CNN – Enough Stupid to Go Around

by | Jun 17, 2018 | Archives, Current Events

There is plenty of stupid to go around in this media rabid environment. Obviously it has infected the FBI. Forget Jim Comey who was fired, instead take for example Peter Strzok who wasn’t. He and Lisa Page are now the world’s best known FBI agents. The FBI, the clandestine law enforcement agency, most famous for highly competent personnel skilled at covering things up, has produced two of the stupidest blabbermouths it possibly could have hired. And this is the same gang that just finished blustering that Trump voters are stupid. Every US citizen and their third grade child knows that these two had an extramarital affair, while attempting to overthrow the government and despite years of training on covert ops … couldn’t keep it a secret. So what is next for the FBI? Clean house but don’t hire from CNN, they can’t keep a secret either, hire from the Inspector General, they are on your side. 

But I digress. CNN is another case in stupid. It used to be my favorite website and my oft viewed news channel. I got my news every morning from CNN site during the Obama and Bush years. I was a Bush supporter and an early Obama supporter, concluding that McCain was always going to be ineffective. I changed back when Obamacare was rammed through without anyone reading it and realized that Obama was never going to get around to improving race relations or the city of Chicago. Yes he managed to improve the economy but back in 2008 the economy couldn’t go anywhere but up. 

I was never that political but I am now that everyone else is.  CNN used to be the goto website for reasonably solid reporting, rather than have to suffer through the radical New York Times or the too business oriented WSJ. You could tell CNN was gushy thrown in with Obama but that was typical. Usually left wing news outlets and high profile entertainers were Bush Bashing and Obama swooning. You kind of get used to it, at least until Trump hit the scene. Then the news networks magically transformed into grotesque mutations, with little resemblance to their original forms. To this day CNN is now a horror show of distorted “fake”: news, hostile opinions and overblown hype with attack writers working 24/7 and using arrays of extreme adjectives to describe Trump’s every move. Everything he says is “Wild, Astonishing, Incredible, ridiculous” and the superlatives drone on. Even solid, respected academicians have fallen in line to pile on. Julian Zelizer was once a credible even keeled writer with Princeton credentials but then wound up on the dark side writing near juvenile articles like his inferiors. 

I could give CNN writers and pundits the benefit of the doubt and call them naive because Trump is clearly a new phenomenon that has them baffled. The media is stuck with taking what he says at face value and extrapolating nothing. However CNN is far more malicious than that and simply intends to force one-sided spin on the public. It is so obvious now that we can thank Trump for exposing an extremely biased media on all fronts. Who knew? I can tolerate some left or right of center but I cannot tolerate totally acrimonious, snarky, cynical one-sided reporting. It means CNN is nothing more than a op-ed blog and not a news organization with journalists.

CNN should not be surprised in the least by Trump’s disrespect for the media. They didn’t decide later on to be biased, they were that way the day he ran for President. He presented a live target who talked like a real human instead of a politician, which made anything he said fair game. But then a strange thing happened. He fought back – big time. He bashed the media right back as much as they bashed him. What a surprise. So all the left wing big media players, along with Hollywood, are as rabid as packs of wild dogs and looking for a lynching – which is why there is all this talk about impeachment. And as much as they love to see him rant, lie, brag, bluster and boast, they are taking it on the chin every day as he hammers away at the blatant hypocrisies and bias.

One would think CNN could tone it down somewhat to make all the opinion pieces (and this is 90% of their reporting) vaguely credible, but these guys have been following suit for some time. The New York Times spews attack pieces one after another as does the Huffington Post. Yes social media has to some degree been the facilitator of political attack journalism but it goes deeper. The utter hate speech towards the President as well as the actual voters of this country has been building on itself with each liberal news source attempting to out-puke the other. Late night news hosts and celebrities are giving themselves high-fives and  piling on as the whole gutter-ridden process lends courage to the next group of hecklers. Which nauseates the average American who is stuck watching or reading politically motivated garbage from people not even in the know. Now the football, basketball, Olympics, movies, actors are all tripping over themselves trying to get out the worst possible filthy comments they can dream up. 

I guess millionaires don’t like billionaires running the country. In fact, Mark Cuban would tell you, even billionaires don’t like billionaires running the country. I guarantee if Cuban were President you would see every bit of feigned moral selective outrage from all corners come at him, no matter what his policies. But back to CNN, the buck stops with the news media. The news starts with them and so do the opinions. If I were Robert Di Niro reading the Huff all the time you bet I would swear at the President.

What fascinates all of us on the right is that CNN and its minions, are actually forced to come out in support of the dictators and terrorists of the world, and against law and order, in order to get their political messaging straight. I mean they are compelled to claim that Kim Jong Un is winning and Trump is losing, that we should not even enforce our border laws despite never-ending illegal crossings or that Vladimir Putin has got us right where he wants us. These are things our enemies love to hear. Sadly CNN is locked into a strategy of fighting against America and its institutions but it isn’t their fault. When a news organization chooses ideological sides it is no longer a neutral observer beholden to nobody,  but a political operative with its own agenda and directives that supersede the public’s interests.       

 

Regulating the English Language

by | Jun 2, 2018 | Current Events

Roseanne Barr was canned this week for tweeting something bad (racist). People never learn, don’t twitter in your shorts while downing some brewskies(or pills).  In fact, don’t use Twitter, you are just propping up an epic fail company that doesn’t deserve a second life. By using Twitter you are putting your career, and maybe your whole life, in jeopardy. Just say no.

Samantha Bee wasn’t canned for saying something bad although her slurs were arguably much worse. Fortunately she does not live in North Korea or her whole family for generations would end up in labor camps for dissing the supreme leader and his daughter. Whereas VJ wouldn’t get the time of day. So there is a double standard and the first one to shout “racism” wins. Well, no, the first one on the left to do it wins. Anything else goes, C word, no problem. Bash women, fine, filthy remarks about the President and his daughter, fair game.

But don’t utter the phrase “Planet of the Apes” which is now the equivalent of the N word. Who knew? Curiously there are several movies out by the same name and I am pretty sure people are still making money by selling or renting them. So why all the uproar? I admit I thought “Muslim Brotherhood” was the offending phrase but I stand corrected. POA is taboo, but I haven’t a clue why. I googled it and the cerebral critics think there might be “metaphors” drawn between blacks and apes. I suppose there could a metaphor between anybody and anything. Darth Vader should be a banned phrase, for having one James Earl Jones as the voice and having dark clothes.

The Muslim Brotherhood, which is a fact, is much worse than Planet of the Apes which is fiction. I will, however concede that POA, has a much sillier ring to it and could be used as an insult in a variety of childish ways. However, I can insist with certainty that both of those phrases by themselves have nothing to do with racism. MB is a group and POA is a movie. Everyone I think would agree. It is only when you add the complexities of language and culture to the mix do you infringe on race. But then books have been using racist language and treading on racist issues for centuries without being banned, except in Fahrenheit 451. God help us if we lose this right to free speech.

Have you every heard a rap song call anyone an ape? Or a Muslim? Nope, only the N word is bad enough for rappers, that says it all. Now, what about MF’er or C word? Are those racist? Well if you are a woman you may well think so. VJ has to endure Planet of the Apes, Ivanka has to endure feckless C word. Is one worse than the other? Well it depends on how you look at it. If you view it as a emotionally charged race issue, calling a black person an ape may well be the moral equivalent of calling then an N word – although I have been around a long time and I haven’t seen it used as such. However, look at it a little more objectively. An ape may well be a bad word in certain contexts, but only after assigning the worst possible meanings and connotations.

But Planet of the Apes? The movie is now the bad word? I am sorry but that is a huge overreach. That is allowing too much of the English language and pop culture to be claimed as racist. That provides too many opportunities for mediocre wordsmiths and drunken twitterers to make mistakes.The activists and rappers can  have the N word and in certain situations they can even have “ape”. and they can even disgrace themselves by calling each other their own banned words with impunity, But they can’t have “Planet of the Apes”, just as they can’t have Star Wars. Not unless they want to pull the movies from the shelves. By same token women, being a protected class as well, are entitled to their own N word and if there ever was one it would be the C word. Feckless C word is even worse.  

The process by which you take a phrase meaning one thing and apply to it a whole slew of other sinister meanings is standard in this culture and is now used to destroy careers. Unfortunately it is difficult, or perhaps impossible, to compartmentalize racist, or perhaps offensive, remarks, because there are too many to control. They have been extrapolated to include increasing elements of the culture, contexts and language. There is little that can be freely said anymore without fear of ridicule and consequences.  

Regulating the English language isn’t a new phenomenon. Similar stigmas are found all throughout American culture. There is plenty to get upset about if you are a somebody who thinks you, or your ancestors, have been unfairly persecuted or discriminated against. The N word used to be used way back in my generation all the time, in jokes too. But because it was thought to be derogatory it became frowned upon, then a banned substance, now it is used all the time, but only by one subculture of the population that evidently has the moral authority to use it. God forbid somebody uses it in Twitter.   

However this process has run amok. Remember the word Sambo? Sambo’s the food chain went out of business because Sambo the name became a bad word. Obviously it wasn’t always a bad word as Sambo’s was very popular just like Denny’s is now, Sambo doesn’t strike me as a bad word. In fact I will bare my soul now and make apologies to the black person I called Sambo some decades ago while playing table soccer with him in college.He got upset and I kind of didn’t know why. Call me naive but to this day nobody quite knows why Sambo is a racist term. :Little Black Sambo was a children’s book written by a mother about 100 years ago. It is a benign story about Tigers turning into butter. It had nothing derogatory to say about race or about Sambo. The book did, however, have different editions with illustrations and portrayals of the little boy Sambo, Not all illustrations were flattering enough for civil rights activists and the rest is history. 

Other cultural racial taboos stem from the same progression of discontent. Blackface, Amos and Andy, Stepin Fetchit and so many other pawns in the racism game serving to curtail and control the otherwise free speech and culture we have come to expect and enjoy.