Martini Bets a Nickel

Cuckoo's Nest Poker Game

If there is one positive thing to be said about Socialism, it is that the philosophy and its adherents are persistent, albeit on a level that could best be described as myopic. Every time and place that Socialism has been implemented has seen the eventual decay of society and decline in the overall contentment of the people on whom it was inflicted. And still the disciples try it again and again.

The methods by which it is peddled to the masses change, but the end goal remains the same; equal misery for all but the perpetrators. Some see it early and veer away in time, while the unfortunate - willing to believe that something could be better - buy it whole, only to regret it later. Albert Einstein once said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, so the question begs to be asked; which group is insane? Is it the purveyors of Socialism, or is it the buyers? 

Since the people who incessantly seek to become the leaders of Socialist societies know exactly what they are doing, we must assume that they are not insane, but rather cunning and, most times, ruthless. It is the buyers who are therefore insane, clinging to the notion that the latest charismatic leader advocating socialistic Utopia will be "different" than his predecessors.

One such person is none other than Virginia Democratic Rep. Jim Moran who earlier this week uttered a phrase that exposed him as one of those "buyers". Attempting to portray the political climate in the U.S. as racist - because President Obama is Black - Moran said the following in a post-State of the Union Address interview with Arab network Alhurra in response to a question about the midterm elections (Emphasis mine)

"It happened ... for the same reason the Civil War happened in the United States. Southern states, particularly the slave holding states, didn't want to see a president who was opposed to slavery. In this case a lot of people in this country, it's my belief, don't want to be governed by an African-American, particularly one who is inclusive, who is liberal, who wants to spend money on everyone and who wants to reach out to include everyone in our society. And that's a basic philosophical clash."

 For starters, his premise is false, since most people want a president to be "inclusive". He is, after all, supposed to be president of all the people, not just the president of those he likes. Moran's error is his seeming belief that the president should spend money on anyone. Certainly it is permissible for any president to engage in philanthropic giving with his own funds, but he has no business spending our money on others. Only a Socialist would agree with that line of thinking.

Joe Meets Candidate Obama

But the current president is among those who hold that belief. As my friend at the Obtuse Observer astutely reminds us, then-candidate Obama told Joe the Plumber in 2008 that, "I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody". With the majority of Americans vehemently opposed to such a concept, those who continue to propagate its alleged virtues remind me of Martini in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

One scene in the movie involves R.P. McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) and Martini (Danny Devito).

[the inmates are playing cards and betting with cigarettes] 

Martini: [rips a cigarette in half] I bet a nickel. 

McMurphy: Dime's the limit, Martini. 

Martini: I bet a dime. 

[Puts the two halves onto the table] 

McMurphy: This is not a dime, Martini. This is a dime. 

[shows a whole cigarette] 

McMurphy: If you break it in half, you don't get two nickels, you get [crap]. Try and smoke it. You understand? 

Martini: Yes. 

McMurphy: You don't understand. 

Then Martini continues to try to bet the two halves as a dime as McMurphy becomes more and more frustrated. Martini, for those who never saw the movie, was one of the insane inmates in a mental hospital.

Even as the electorate in the U.S. clearly demonstrates its aversion to Socialism of even the most mild variety, Obama and his ilk continue to try to implement it under the guise of benevolence. Benevolence is for kings, however, and since the United States was founded by men who fought a king and won, there is little reason to believe that their descendants would timidly accept a new one. 

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The Wall Unanticipated



Progressive Kryptonite? 



And the Grinch, with his grinch-feet ice-cold in the snow,  

Stood puzzling and puzzling: "How could it be so?

"It came without ribbons! It came without tags!

"It came without packages, boxes or bags!"

And he puzzled three hours, `till his puzzler was sore.

Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before!

"Maybe Christmas," he thought, "doesn't come from a store.

"Maybe Christmas . . . perhaps . . . means a little bit more!" - Dr. Seuss

 Exactly what is it about that Constitution, anyway? So close were the Progressives to rendering that old parchment moot, only to be thwarted in the eleventh hour, that there are thus far unsubstantiated reports of heads actually exploding in the land of alleged academia. For nearly five decades, the march was inexorable and the path devoid of obstructions. Success was as doubtful as a subsequent sunrise.

What has happened to the brilliant plans of the Liberal Progressives that once seemed as certain a reality as old age? The most obvious answer is the Tea Party and a spirit that refuses to die, the same spirit that has been mocked ever more boldly by its critics as time wore on and confidence waxed. It is precisely the reason for the analogous reference to Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas.



Not Going According To Plan

 As the Grinch stood atop the mountain with Max, his subservient pooch, expecting his insidious actions to finally break the spirit of the Whos in Whoville, he was devastated to witness that all of his nefarious work had proved fruitless, failing to dampen the joyous celebration taking place below in spite of his work.

The real world sometimes mirrors fiction, it has been said, and so it has now. Congressional Democrats, poised to finalize the plan set forth in the 1960's, have suddenly found that their formerly sedentary foes were not dead, but merely dozing. The media are represented by Max, who participated in the attempted ruin of Whoville, albeit with regrets. I realize that such a comparison is much too kind to today's excuse for journalism, but one I make nonetheless.

When Obama put his signature to the monstrosity of his dream law, universal health care, it was presumed to be the final nail in the Conservative movement's coffin. As it turns out, it was more like throwing cold water on a sleeping citizen, which would account for the necessity of an allegedly triumphant president to continue to travel the country in order to sell it -  the very law he had just signed - to the American people. We demanded a refund.

There's an old joke with the theme, "...and that's when the fight started." This one started when the Democrats - in their final, frenzied assault on the Constitution - began telling us that that document didn't really mean what we believed it to mean. The gloves finally came off when their victory dance left footprints all over it.

Oh, they insisted upon displaying a false bravado, with Obama threatening to veto a repeal by Congress. Even the media (we'll call it "Max") tried to assist, insisting that such a repeal would be futile and a horrible waste of time because of its chances of succeeding. No matter, the Tea Party-fueled members of Congress will not be deterred, and will ultimately choke off the funding for ObamaCare if that's what it takes.

Through all of this, the Liberal Progressives kept waiting for us to buckle, to crack under the weight of their momentum. They tried to smear the Tea Party members, lied about the tone of the rallies, and failed to substantiate a single claim. Even Andrew Breitbart, who offered $100,000 to anyone who could provide audio or video of the alleged racial slurs hurled at Black congressmen, still has his hundred grand.

Just when the Tea Party was supposed to falter and display the horrendous characteristics of angry, white racists, they instead did something amazing; they sang. They sang, they smiled, and they cleaned up after themselves, all the while maintaining a calm civility that infuriated the supposed intellectuals who could not fathom their own failure after so much seeming success. And then the Tea Party helped the sane regain control.

So it stands to reason that, despite the majority still enjoyed by the likes of Harry Reid in the Senate, there is a very real chance that vulnerable Democrats will desert the sinking ship and join in the repeal. I'll bet the Left never saw this one coming.

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At What Point Treason?

James Hansen Wants to Save Earth
By Killing America

 James Hansen may be the top climate scientist at NASA, but he's no fan of democracy. While on a trip to China last November, Hansen wrote - in the South China Morning Post, no less - about the way to bring America around to his way of thinking... or bring us to our knees economically. Pardon me, but such actions come perilously close to treasonous, if not actually crossing that line. One must also wonder whether he traveled there on taxpayer money to plunge a dagger into our backs.

I suppose there should be a modicum of gratitude offered to the good doctor, since he has tipped the hand of the warming alarmist crowd and their desire to wreak havoc on our economy. However, since my little corner of the blogosphere is one of the few places where such an admission will be exposed, I doubt that much will ever come of it.

ABC News will certainly never "out" James Hansen or his despicable plans for America with the aid of the Communist Chinese. More likely, they will champion his cause as somehow righteous in the face of the knuckle-dragging deniers who consider him to be a kook. What troubles me, however, is that he will also be not only ignored for his seditious op-ed in a Chinese paper, but he will never be paid a visit by the agencies responsible for protecting American interests and sovereignty.

There have been dopey entertainers who have traveled abroad in the past for the purpose of bashing America  as self aggrandizement, and while that is still deplorable, it is largely meaningless and dismissible. When an alleged expert who makes his living by the grace of the American taxpayer as an agent of the Federal government does it, it carries some weight, at least in the eyes of our enemies.

Part of Hansen's diatribe in a Chinese publication stated the following:

"After agreement with other nations, e.g., the European Union, China and these nations could impose rising internal carbon fees. Existing rules of the World Trade Organization would allow collection of a rising border duty on products from all nations that do not have an equivalent internal carbon fee or tax.

The United States then would be forced to make a choice. It could either address its fossil-fuel addiction ... or ... accept continual descent into second-rate and third-rate economic well-being."

As Patrick J. Michaels of The Washington Times correctly points out, "The WTO, in fact, has not 'ruled' that it can impose environmental tariffs of any kind, much less those of such magnitude that they would destroy the world's largest economy." Nevertheless, Hansen makes the assertion, and disciples of the myth of AGW believe it, completely oblivious to the fact that their hero had just advocated that a foreign nation force his own into a position detrimental to it.

Hansen Protest Arrest, Sept. 2010

I have to believe that if an employee of the federal government traveled overseas and asked his host country to launch a missile attack on the United States, that person would immediately earn the status of enemy of the state, and be arrested and tried for treason upon his return on extradition, if possible. Why is it different, then, for a government scientist to beg for an economic assault from China as a means to achieve a desired goal that is bitterly disputed?

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was created by the George W. Bush administration in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Even some of his supporters were wary of its creation, fearing what it would become under future administrations. Those concerns are rapidly becoming warranted.

When DHS, under the current administration, is more concerned with Grandma's Polygrip at the airline security checkpoint than with someone of James Hansen's "gravitas" inviting economic Armageddon from the Chinese at the most vulnerable fiscal juncture in our history, there is cause for genuine alarm. Will such terrible news sell the most switches from Insurer X to Geico in the 6 O'Clock slot on ABC News? Probably not, which is why many will never learn of it, and arguably half of those who do will refuse to believe it simply because of ABC's refusal to report it.

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It Must Be a Bad Dream

Just a Bad Dream

Since the Democrats reclaimed Congress in 2006, reality has taken a beating, and the truth has been as hard to find as an honest politician. The media - print, audio and video - split into bitterly opposed camps, and veracity slipped into a coma. Once Barack Obama completed the Democratic triad, someone pulled the plug, and probity passed into the Great bye and bye.

I'm reminded of Dallas, a prime time soap opera - conceived in the '70's, and launched in 1978 - about a Texas oil family. Patrick Duffy played the role of Bobby Ewing, the younger brother of J.R, played by Larry Hagman.

In the 85-86 season, Duffy decided to leave, and the producers killed off the Bobby Ewing character. The remainder of the season centered on his grieving wife Pamela (Victoria Principal), woven into the other plot lines. Ratings dropped off because Duffy's was a popular character plot, his marriage to a daughter of the Ewing family's arch rival mirroring Shakespeare's Montague-Capulet tragedy. The producers had to bring Duffy back.

In a move that drew disbelieving howls from fans - even those who were Duffy's biggest fans - the show opened the 86-87 season with the scene where Pamela Ewing awakened to the sound of Bobby in the shower. The entire previous season, in which Bobby died, was just a bad dream. I was not a big fan of the show, but its influence was inescapable at the time. Everyone talked about it on the job, and I found myself incredulous at the move, as well.

Now? Now, since 2009, when major news organizations such as ABC News have succumbed to the charms of Obama, I find myself praying that the past two years have been a bad dream. I hope to awake one morning to the sound of George W. Bush in the shower, figuratively speaking of course. The reason for this is the latest piece on an ABC News blog titled The Note.

Written by Michael Falcone and Amy Walter, the piece titled Obama, Palin And Arizona: A Tale Of Two Speeches briefly mentions Obama's speech in Arizona about the tragic shooting there over the past weekend. The rest is a whining complaint about Sarah Palin and her gall in hitting back at the ridiculous claims that she bears some culpability in that shooting. At the end of this pathetic tag-team rant, the duo offers a summary subtitled The Bottom Line, in which they make the most absurd assertion imaginable.

Their conclusion begins thus:

Sarah Palin, once again, has found a way to become part of the story. And she may well face further criticism for the timing and scope of her remarks.

That one nearly had my brain banging against the inside of my skull as a result of the involuntary and vigorous head shake that ensued. I believe I may also have alarmed my wife with a barely audible shout of "WHAT?!?"

Before the shooter in Arizona was even identified, commentators were dragging Palin and others into the story, blaming them while agonizing over some desperate motive for the actual perpetrator, seeking to portray him as a victim of an ideology opposed to their own. To now suggest that Sarah Palin had somehow thrust herself into the middle of this - when she was probably shooting her TV show from Alaska - is somewhat akin to blaming a bear for getting caught in the trap that you set.

Ah, Sarah would get the reference. Meanwhile, I just want to wake up in the real world, if it still exists.

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Political Profit From the Pain

Liberal Talks Calm Face

I purposely avoided writing about the Gabrielle Giffords shooting because I felt it unseemly to take advantage of such a tragedy, particularly in light of a nine-year-old girl having been killed. Conservative talk shows probably would have shown the same reticence if not for the disgusting exploitation exhibited by the Liberal side.

Left wing pundits and politicians were instantly seizing upon the opportunity to ride this vehicle of violence until the wheels fall off. Nearly orgasmic were they in their unbridled glee at the chance to advance their agenda at the expense of every victim of Jared Loughner, the perpetrator responsible for the girl's death and Giffords' critical condition.

Now we are being treated to a relentless barrage of admonitions to mind what we say, and Conservatives are being accused unjustly for somehow encouraging Loughner to commit this heinous act, when the facts point in the opposite direction. Projecting their own culpability on the Right, people such as the Reverend Al Sharpton are demanding "civility in discourse", but only from the Right. The Left continues to feign innocence, and the media are willing accomplices in these baseless accusations.

The Ruins of Freddie's Fashion Mart

It is particularly ironic coming from the likes of Sharpton, considering his complicity in past incidents, actually and more directly resulting in death, acts for which he was never criticized by the media. Let's examine some of the past deeds of the good Reverend, who now seeks to be the voice of reason, shall we?

It was 1995, and Freddie Harari of the Bronx, NY was a business owner who rented a retail building on 125th Street in Harlem called Freddie's Fashion Mart.  The landlord, The United House of Prayer, was a black Pentecostal Church. They had asked Freddie to evict his subtenant in order to expand. That store was The Record Shack, a black-owned business that had been there for quite some time.

Sharpton led a protest in Harlem against the planned eviction, saying, "We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business." On December 8th of 1995, one of the protesters, Roland J. Smith Jr., entered Harari's store and shot several customers. He sprinkled a flammable liquid and ignited it before turning the gun on himself. He was among the eight dead at the scene.

Yankel Rosenbaum

Four years earlier, it was also Sharpton's rhetoric that fueled the Crown Heights Riots, which lasted for three days. When it was all over, 152 police officers and 38 civilians were injured, 27 vehicles were destroyed, and 7 stores were burned or looted. And Yankel Rosenbaum was dead.Now he wants others to tone down the rhetoric?

Appearing on the Ed Schultz Show after the Arizona shooting, Sharpton said that "there are some very unbalanced people here, in this country, that anything can trigger". I guess Sharpton is suggesting that the rest of us, who are not "unbalanced",  must walk on egg shells as a result. Of course, that only applies to Conservative speech. The music that Loughner listened to is immune from such scrutiny and causal effect, despite the violent nature of the lyrics. It has not been demonstrated that he listened to Sarah Palin, or read any of her work, yet she is the object of the Left's angst.

And Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) actually suggested that the reading on the House floor of the United States Constitution - which he said was "uncalled for" - somehow contributed to the Arizona shooting. This is a member of the party that held a political rally in 2002, disguised as a memorial service for Paul Wellstone. The same party whose president said they would bring a gun if we brought a knife. And the same party that is once again pushing to censor freedom of speech in the name of the Fairness Doctrine - a misnomer if ever there was one - on the back of Gabrielle Giffords, and the memory of 9-year-old Christina Green, and the other five dead.

John Green, the father of Christina, asked that his daughter's death not be used as an excuse to remove more freedoms, saying, “We don’t need any more restrictions on our society.” I agree wholeheartedly, and condemn the greedy opportunists who refuse to heed his grief-stricken words.

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Don't Undo That Voodoo That I Do

Now He's Worried

Hope. Change. Progress...these were the things that Barack Obama promised in his run to the White House, and unfortunately, many believed him. After two years in office, that herd has thinned considerably, although there are still some left who cling to the lie.

As for Obama himself, he is still running around insisting that his policies are working, that we're moving in the right direction, and we've come a long way out of that proverbial ditch that George W. Bush drove us into. Even the former Speaker of the House was out there the other day continuing to blame Bush. Just as the Left tries to  erase or revise history - which would negate our ability to learn from it - so have they become the victims of their own agenda.

But it's worse than that; they have also suffered severe short-term memory loss in that the recent electoral massacre - which ushered in a sea-change of Congressional members - was a clear message that the majority of Americans don't want to take the Democrats' cod liver oil. Yet, just like the nanny-minded parental units they believe themselves to be, they insist on holding our mouths open in an effort to get us to accept the offending liquid.

The message in Obama's latest weekly radio address was a hubristic warning to the new Republican majority not to "refight the battles of the past two years that distract us from the hard work of moving our economy forward." In other words, he's trying to tell the Republicans not to undo his handiwork, even though the reason they are there in the first place is because the people wanted them to go there and undo Obama's disastrous policies. It's not far from your mother warning you not to induce vomiting after she fed your child poison.

There is an odd penchant on the part of Democrats to invoke the will of the majority only when it suits their purposes. But when they have an agenda they deem fair and just, they don't care a whit about the will of the majority. Remember how the Democrats railed on about the 2000 election of George W. Bush because the majority of people voted for him, despite the law of the Electoral College? In their minds it was advantage, majority. But when the people vote in favor of a proposition in California, a Liberal judge invalidates the legal ballot.

So now Obama wants to declare the past set in concrete, his work unalterable, and for the new Republican Congress to progress forward, not to be concerned with the damage he has already wrought. That's done, he declares, let's move on to the next item.

Not so fast, Sir. You can't just go setting bombs and expect that decent people won't snuff out the fuses.

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Cleaning Up the Past

Stephen King's Langoliers

Common wisdom once advised that the only way to progress was to learn from history, thereby avoiding the mistakes of our predecessors by correcting our course accordingly.

A wise man once said that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. Truer words were never spoken. Human history is rife with injustice and cruelty unimaginable to modern civilized societies, mainly because we learned that such behavior was deplorable, and we changed it.

Women's Suffrage and the Civil Rights Act would most likely never have happened if our offspring were deprived of the knowledge of what was wrought before them. Without the social barometer of the past, behaviors would have remained the same. History is the closest thing to time travel that man is capable of, the ability to peer into what came before to see how and why we got where we are today.

One of the great themes of science fiction is the idea of actually travelling through time. A common theme in these stories is the danger of altering the present reality by tinkering with the events that led to it. In 1995, Stephen King laid those fictional fears to rest with The Langoliers. 

In King's story, a small group of airline passengers accidentally gets caught in a time warp, and are transported roughly fifteen minutes into the past. They soon discover a disturbing truth; there is no distant past to travel to because the Langoliers - a ruthless and voracious collection of horrifying creatures - eat the past, cleansing every trace of it like an unfortunate cow wading into a piranha-filled river.

                                                        ***


Would Twain Recognize This Today?



My friend over at The Edisto Joe Outlook the other day pointed out the latest absurdity by the Left, in their attempts to edit Mark Twain. The purpose, it seems, is to eliminate the "offensive" terms in Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer that were common vernacular in Twain's era. In Wednesday's Mark Twain Revised And Politically Correct, Joe writes:

One of America's greatest authors, Samuel Clements, aka, Mark Twain, has now had two of his greatest works, "Huck Finn" and "Tom Sawyer" revised into a new combined edition, Mark Twain's The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer And Huckelberry Finn, courtesy of one Mr. Mark Gribben and New South Books of Alabama. The new version no longer will contain the dreaded N-word, nor will it contain the words "injun" or "half-breed." 



The piece goes on to explain that those terms have now been replaced with "slave", "Indian" and "half-blood", respectively. The reason? The author, Mr. Gribben, is the victim of the New World, a place where people suddenly seem to have a right not to be offended. So now, we will see a broadened effort to scrub the works of giants, to edit the work of better men because they were the product of their time.

It is a dangerous road to traverse. Once masterpieces are altered to suit the present, they will more resemble the product of modernity and alter our perception of the past. And what if some future revisionist finds the terms used by Gribben to be offensive? Eventually, Twain's works will be unrecognizable.

It is ludicrous for the Left to believe that because past events were deemed offensive by today's standards, they somehow have a right to deny or alter them. While it is comforting to know that we cannot physically travel back in time and alter the present, it is frightening to realize that there are still those who have found a way to get it done.

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The New Catch Phrase: Constitutional Fetish

Where's the Expiration Date?

Liberals - now to be referred to as "Progressives" because Liberals no longer liked the negative connotation of the word "liberal" - have been scared witless (I know, I know) by the sudden truculence of the people. As they marched onward with their radical plans to transform America into their Socialist Utopia, those formerly passive people were either unaware or indifferent, perhaps refusing to believe the reality of what was afoot.

No longer. With the rise of the former Speaker of the House to the election of Barack Hussein Obama, people finally saw and realized the full extent of what the Progressives were attempting to do. And they rose up, loudly.

The response from the left - both politicians and pundits - was a defiant one in which they attempted to ridicule and belittle the new opposition, and it almost worked. If not for the relentless work of the Tea Party and similar groups, combined with a brave new crop of political nubiles unafraid to embrace the new ferocity, the Left may have succeeded.

There were many different attacks from the new "Obama Movement" on us. There was the "gun-toting, Bible-clinging" intended insult, which seems a strange position for an allegedly devout Christian like Barack Obama. The very people at whom that barb was hurled, however, instead caught and embraced it proudly. Obama even denigrated middle Americans for having American flags on their pickup trucks. Again, the response from middle Americans was, "Damn right"!

Deeply held American values, generations old and passed down from parents, were suddenly the object of ridicule. The Left tried to pass such traditions off as old and archaic. We weren't buying.

During the lead up to the passage of Obama Care, when constituents demanded of their representatives to know the Constitutional authority of Congress to ram it down our throats, some said that they didn't care about that document. They said it was too imperative to get the bill - which they hadn't even read - passed. Big mistake. People embraced the Constitution even more tightly.

Not a problem for the Progressive cabal; now they wonder aloud what this new "fetish" for the Constitution means, and why we right-wingers care so much. According to Merriam-Webster's dictionary, a fetish is defined as -  b : an object of irrational reverence or obsessive devotion.

That is critical, because it signifies that the Left views the document responsible for this great nation's rise to prominence as irrational, and to revere that document as obsessive. They would prefer to toss it aside like an old novel and move on (pardon the pun), and take this country in a new direction.

Sound familiar? It should. The Democrats slogan leading up to the 2006 elections that swept them into power was "A New Direction for America". And in 2008, the Obama campaign was all about "change". Since then, we have gotten both, and all it's done is to drive more and more people back to the Founding document. The left calls that "going backward". Glenn Beck has a better description.

Beck portrays it as simply going back far enough to see where we left the tracks, and restart on the one that gave us the best success. I agree, and it is something we are still capable of doing, so long as we don't let the bullies make us cry.

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No Longer a Need to Pretend

It began - at least for me - with Dan Rather's embarrassing fall from grace with his refusal to acknowledge that he used forged documents designed to indict George W. Bush's military record. Oh, I know, it's been argued that Walter Cronkite was the template back in the days of Vietnam and Kennedy versus Nixon, but those were times when I was more concerned with capturing bees in a jar or building snow forts.

They were certainly times long before the inception of Fox News, an outfit reviled by the competition due to jealousy, and by the political left because of damage inflicted. It was Anita Dunn, Obama's former Communications Director, who was the attack dog of the administration, claiming that Fox News was not a "legitimate news organization", a mantra that the president himself soon repeated.

No, we were led to believe, only "real" news sources like ABC or CBS were to be trusted. Never mind the chilling notion that an American government was suddenly in the business of attacking the news media, in whatever incarnation; the viciousness with which it did so was unprecedented. Fox has been the target simply because they tell the story the alleged real news media deliberately conceals, and because much of the broadcast day is decidedly right-leaning.

Fair enough. So let's agree that Fox is biased - a notion they have done little to dispute - but of that fact they are unapologetic. But what of the blatantly obvious bias of the Big Broadcast news networks? Sure, they vehemently deny any accusations of bias, and bristle at the very mention of it, but come on, do they really think we're that naive?

When ABC News in June of 2009 gave the president an hour-long platform to promote "health care", ABC defended the move from critics. Ken McKay, then Chief of Staff for the Republican National Committee, wrote in a letter to ABC News President David Westin, in which he said, "The president has stated time and time again that he wants a bipartisan debate. Therefore, the Republican Party should be included in this prime time event."  ABC News Senior Vice President Kerry Smith disagreed, countering with the claim that any viewer who watches will be sure to find the network's coverage is "informative, fair and civil."

Then there is the problem with unemployment. Remember how the media pounded Bush relentlessly over the unemployment percentage, which then hovered around 5%? They joined Democrats in portraying that figure as exaggerated because the people who were among the employed had lost higher-paying jobs with better benefits, and were now forced to "flip burgers" to get by. Suddenly, however, under the leadership of Barack Obama, flipping burgers was a splendid new "career".

In May of 2009, I saw on ABC's World News Tonight with Charles Gibson, what to that point was the most astounding example of State Run media I had ever seen. Discussing the April jobs figures about to be released, Gibson announced that 539,000 jobs were lost. He followed up with the great news that in February alone, 4.3 million jobs were created!

The next day, I wrote When Democrat Presidents Create Jobs, in which I described how suddenly the lower quality jobs the Liberal media once complained about were the saving grace of unemployment running rampant. An excerpt:

He gives an example stating that 4.3 million Americans got new jobs in February. Then the video starts and we see (are you reading this, MoveOn?) middle aged people as part of the 72 who just got hired at...a burger joint. They interviewed a young man who had "just lost his construction job" and who is the new "fry guy". 

The piece goes on to gush about Walmart expecting to hire tens of thousands of new workers, and also that the federal government has hired 62,000 new people. 

Now, ABC News has taken water-carrying to a new level. To start the New Year, on January first, ABC News Political Director Amy Walter issued a warning to Republicans about trying to repeal "ObamaCare". On ABC's Good Morning America, Walter had this to say:

"If Republicans decide they're going to spend the first six months of this year going over and debating the individual mandate or ObamaCare or whatever they want to call it, I think that's not going to sit very well with the electorate."

 It's not enough to just be incredulous that an alleged "news" outlet would issue warnings to either political party (their job is to report on events, is it not?). No, one would also expect that the people responsible for informing the electorate were themselves informed. So how does Ms. Walter not know of the overwhelming majority of the electorate opposed to ObamaCare?

There are some who will ask me to quit complaining. After all, Fox pundits issue the same kinds of warnings all the time right?

Yes, that is true. But if the uber-respected ABC News is now doing it, wouldn't that equate them with Fox, which has been reviled and ridiculed by the government and its minions? It then becomes a question of integrity and intent. Fox has the former, while the media that hides within a false cloak of respectability has the latter.

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