Does Anyone Really Care
About the Brian Williams Kerfuffle?
It's hardly surprising given what conservatives have known for decades about the true nature of the enemedia.
Aside from the fun of finding a good excuse to indulge in an orgy of Schadenfreude, what possible benefit could there be from dwelling for days on anything to trivial and pathetic?
It is kind of laughable, getting confused as to whether or not you were in a helicopter that was hit by an RPG, but I suppose if we tell ourselves often enough we may eventually come to even believe them ourselves.
ReplyDeleteI grew up around a TV big shot, and met a lot of people in the business, the old Big Three in NYC, and they were always these 'bigger than life' sorts of characters. I mean ALL of them. I think to work in that business, you have to be. I wonder if Williams had a few drinks before he let that little doozy flip. But remember, they're not your enemy. They're really not. They are big egos making big money for getting attention. They are usually very impressive and hardworking people too. But they don't live here on Earth with you and I, FreeThinke. They live in TV Land... forever... And remember this too, Roger Ailes is the penultimate TV guy. And honesty? His entire network is pretty much nothing but making crazy $#!# up all day.
ReplyDeleteJMJ
JMJ,
ReplyDeleteInteresting point: I wonder if Williams had a few drinks before he let that little doozy flip.
Brian Williams has now lost all credibility. I expect that NBC will announce his dismissal any minute now. He'll probably hit the highly-paid speakers' circuit and make a mint.
ReplyDeleteBrian Williams is a news reader, not a reporter.
DeleteHe reads what is put in front of him and the next time he does any in
depth investigative reporting will be the first.
Whether it's him or Chuck Todd or any of the others they are just corporate shills and don't dare step out of line.
They are not CORPORATE shills, Canardo, they are shills for the LEFTIST AGENDA of the D'RAT Party.
DeleteHowever, read my post below about The Oligarchs, which does tend o support your position, because Big Business and Moguls who administer and finance it long ago JOINED the Forces of Darkness. Instead of trying to BEAT the Left, they JOINED it and SUBVERtED it from within -- a tactic learned from the insidious methods used by Cultural Marxists no doubt.
No one will EVER be able to "beat" BUSINESS, because -- like it or not -- BUSINESS is the primary force that keeps Civilization alive and MONEY is what keeps BUSINESS alive, capiche?
Yes, I care!
ReplyDeleteI don't want people who are giving me the "news" lying to me!
Then stop reading the commercial news.
DeleteJMJ
We have enough LIES coming from our own President !
ReplyDeleteI wonder which commercial media outlet lied to you about that... Hmmm...
DeleteJMJ
It's the support of clowns like this that gets people to vote for a guy like Obama.
ReplyDeleteThat's serious stuff.
Ed,
DeleteExcellent point!
This guy shills for whomever is in office.
DeleteObama, Bush, Clinton, Raygun ... the American public hasn't
bothered to look below the surface of any administration.
And the networks (especially Faux Snooze) are paid to keep it that way.
It's ridiculous to say this is specific to Obama.
Williams doesn't hide his politics.
DeleteJMJ
C'mon, Canardo, the ENEMEDIA was in quasi-MILITANT OPPOSITION to President Reagan, and the two Bushes the whole time they were in office. And it if hadn't been for a bit of dumb luck that knowledge of The Little Blue Dress fell into the hands of Lucianne Goldberg, Linda Tripp and Matt Drudge, the Monica Lewinsky Affair –– and the tidal wave of prurient CRAP that followed the initial revelation of knee pads, and sex under the desk in the Oral Office ºº would have been set under the rug, and poor silly Monica, who loudly declared herself "in LOVE with the Big Creep" over the phone to Linda Tripp would have been CRUCIFIED as a "just another air-headed BIMBO with Big Ideas trying to cash in on something that never happened."
DeleteMonica might even have been "disappeared" had it not been for "The Little Blue Dress."
FreeThinke, the commercial media exists to make money. There are some caring people who do work in that field though. There was nothing "quasi-militant," a ridiculous hyperbole, about the way the press covered some of the bad things those Presidents did. I'm sorry that you lack the moral lens to see these as bad things, but many people did, and the commercial media told the story to those many people if they were willing to sit down and bear with the commercials. That's that way it works. I don't know what sort of Third World Junta sort of America you want to live in, but I want one with a press that asks questions, especially of the outright lowlifes who do nothing useful whatsoever like the people you cons put in office.
DeleteJMJ
Jersey,
DeleteWe're resembling a third-world junta more and more, and it's thanks to the press that has turned into Obama's house organ.
The GOPeer’s-Tea-Pee-ers, extremist right wing, blogs that we read these days, including this one reminds its readers that the dehumanization, debasement, murdering, beheading, burning-alive and torturing of Americans, Japanese, Jordanian, and British, citizens as recently occurred would make certain zealots uncomfortable when faced with this horrid truth. What those zealots didn't understand (and why should they when understanding would interfere with their Cult of Hatred for Mr. Obama?) is that President Obama simply acknowledged that religions often use their holy books and scriptures to justify genocide.
ReplyDeleteThe ignorant on the right will have none of it. Any reminders of the history of genocide of Native Americans and the brutalization of black Americans is, to them, heretical and sullies their infantile idea of America. Like children who can't deal with their humanly flawed parents, they refuse to face reality, and instead demonize those who place that reality in front of their noses.
Their fits and tantrums do not change history or truths; their ignorant, Childish, Looney Tunes Goofball, responses only point to the fact that they prefer to ignore them.
Our President is doing what he does best - teaching. Recently read his CV - didn't know one of his classes he taught at Harvard Law was on the Constitution. Aside from the fact I'm prejudiced in his favor (he's left handed - we stick together) he is exactly what our country needs right now.
I noticed lately that the number of Muslim-Americans is growing rapidly in the Washington, D.C., area. Obama invited a Imam or religious leader from VA to meet with him at the White House for their opinions. He surrounds himself with a diverse section of the United States, like Al Sharpton for example.
I always encourage people to stop saying Republicans represent Christianity, and call them out on what they really worship. I call it “Republicanity” and I consider it a cult. It’s a perversion of Christianity mixed with a political set of man-made beliefs. These people view their devotion to the GOP on the same level they do their belief in God. To them, the Republican party is the party of “real Christians.” They don’t need facts or reality to support their political beliefs, they have their own idea of what “faith” should be. Of course, It makes absolutely no damn sense.
Jesus warned us against those who would manipulate the word of God for their own selfish ambitions. He opposed greed and encouraged giving. You know, the exact oppose of what Republicans stand for. So please, stop calling these Pile of Horse Manure Republicans “Christians” because they’re not.
Millions of Republicans have abandoned Christianity because these people have hijacked a faith to distort it for their own political and monetary gains!!
Hey Fox Snooze, or whatever your “Progressive” name is.... Ya know, people like you amaze me. What do you think your brain is for? Seriously. Why do you bother to have one? Is it just there to keep your heart beating and to tell you when you need to take a crap? Someone with an IQ as low as yours should have a low voice too! Calling you stupid would be an insult to stupid people.
DeleteBut go ahead and keep talking, maybe someday you'll say something intelligent!
Who let in the 7 paragraph-high stack of leftwing shit?
DeleteMr FreeThinke,
DeleteThank you for leaving up the post from the Democrat ditz Fox Snooze.
She's probably some kind of troll having fun, because no one could be so stupid.
She read Obummer's CV? Then she would have learned he taught a University of Chicago, not Harvard.
We're also quite aware of how the solid Democrat south enslaved people and committed horrible racial crimes, even after Republican Abe Lincoln freed the black people, at a great cost of white man's blood.
We are also ashamed of how DEMOCRAT FDR interned Japanese-Americans.
Besides the little red demons chuckling in her head, I don't know who says Republicans represent Christianity.
We can only conclude that the Red Fox is a blathering idiot, probably attributable to the over-consumption of prescription drugs shes takes in the vain attempt to perk up her drab and pathetic life.
Poor soul... I feel sorry for you.
That's some mouthful, and you didn't even come up for air!
ReplyDeleteAlthough you have plenty of Hot Air!
Sulfurous gas from his nether throat, no doubt, Irish.
DeleteI'm going to let it stand, as a classic example of putrid, thoughtless, ill-tempered partisan rhetoric.
Both sides indulge in it all the time, of course, but naturally it seems more vicious and more stupid when it comes from the Left -- at least to us Conservatives. ;-)
I completely agree with Ducky's comments.
ReplyDeleteThe press is supposed to keep the government uneasy, regardless of who runs which branch. They've abdicated that responsibility and are now members of the same ruling elite as the politicians.
They all stink, and when our country goes down the tubes, their professional malpractice and gross malfeasance will be one of the principle causes.
YUP! Absolutely! But nothing stinks out loud more that Marxian-Fabian-Communist-Socialist-Progressive-Liberal-Statist DICTOCRATS, –––– unless it's The OLIGARCHS, those heavily MONIED INTERNATIONALISTS who can manipulate the value of currency, control the supply of funds, and who own the primary sources of Natural Resources and the means of distributing them as well, no doubt.
DeleteTheir exalted position enables them to run EVERYTHING behind the scenes, and renders them IMMUNE to meaningful criticism and prosecution for their misdeeds.
As Lady Macbeth said, "... None can call [their] power to account."
The OLIGARCHS have been playing ALL sides against the Middle since Time Immemorial. Left, Right or Center and always to THEIR advantage. YOU and I don't matter. It always has been and always will be all about THEM.
Anyone remember when Ronnie Reagan told Yitzhak Shamir that he had helped liberate Auschwitz?
DeleteMemory is tricky.
Why should we take YOUR word for THAT Canardo, when we now you get YOUR "facts" from sources like The Nation, The New Yorker, The Daily Kos, Truthout, Buzzflash, and the New York Times etc.?
DeleteA petard for the Reagan canard.
DeleteFT,
DeleteMaybe Duck got that info from the Atlantic (2007):
...That kind of personal embellishment was also at work when John F. Kennedy, courting the elites as well as the masses, told Time magazine’s Hugh Sidey that he could read 1,200 words a minute (a figure JFK pulled out of the air); when Lyndon Johnson exclaimed to U.S. troops in Korea that his great-great-grandfather “died at the Alamo” (a great-great-uncle fought at San Jacinto, but wasn’t killed); when Bill Clinton claimed he’d heard about the Iowa caucuses “since I was a little boy” (they didn’t begin until he was in graduate school); and when Al Gore told a labor crowd that his mother used to lull him to sleep when he was a baby with “Look for the Union Label” (a ditty written in 1975, when Gore was twenty-seven years old). One bizarre whopper: Ronald Reagan told Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, in separate Oval Office visits, that as a young soldier in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during World War II, he had filmed the liberation of Nazi death camps; Reagan never served in Europe at all, though his work involved handling footage shot by military cameramen and war correspondents. Covering the White House for the past dozen years, I’ve become something of a connoisseur of the presidential boast. My favorite was when Clinton told The Des Moines Register editorial board that he was the only president who knew anything about agriculture before coming to office—skipping over actual farmers like Washington, Jefferson, Truman, and Jimmy Carter, as well as the Iowa farm boy Herbert Hoover....
Maybe Reagan was in early-stage Alzheimer's at the time? I don't know the dates of the above.
Also note that the above mentions several other Presidents.
The topic of Reagan's statements about the death camps came up here two days ago -- on Reagan's birthday.
Ducky,
DeleteGot any direct quotes from Reagan on that?
And thanks for reminding us what a lying sack Democrat Blumenthal is. Unlike the cloudy account of what Reagan may have said, Blumenthal told bald-faced lies in a clear-cut case of stolen valor...
But the most damning part? Dumocrats elected him anyway!
Answering the headline... Yes.
ReplyDeleteShouldn't everyone care about truth in the news?
Of course, Gandolf, but we as a society need to start relearning how to evaluate infractions of this and that in proper perspective. It isn't as though Brian Williams' ill-conceived adventure in self-glorification were on a level with the treachery of -- let us say -- Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
DeleteI'm more concerned about proportionality than I am in cataloguing every peccadillo as though it were a Mortal Sin of Stalinesque proportions.
Our hunger for sensationalism and our eagerness to wreak vengeance whenever anything resembling an excuse arises are symptomatic of a sick society on the wane. I deplore it.
We essentially agree. However, Williams' credibility took a severe hit. As it should have. Wonder what long term effect it might have. If any.
DeleteThersites,
ReplyDeleteExcellent link!
Blumenthal, Reagan, and the Big Lie
ReplyDeleteBy James Kahn
Ronald Reagan's memory is being defamed in an effort to defend a Democrat attorney general caught lying about his military service. The tactic has deep roots on the left.
On Thanksgiving in 2003, President Bush made a surprise visit to troops in Iraq. The initial wildly enthusiastic public response to Bush's visit was dampened by reports that the roast turkey the president held for photographers was fake. The stories turned out to be erroneous, and newspapers subsequently issued corrections. But the damage was done, and the "plastic turkey" story persisted for years. A potentially inspiring moment for Bush's presidency instead became a subject for ridicule.
Now a claim about President Ronald Reagan has resurfaced in connection with senate candidate Richard Blumenthal's misstatements about his military service. After the Blumenthal story broke, left-leaning pundits immediately began reminding us that Reagan had falsely claimed to have filmed the liberation of German concentration camps at the end of World War II.
Alan Colmes, for example, writing about Blumenthal's problems, adds, "After all, it wasn't fatal when Ronald Reagan fudged his military service a bit," and quotes Al Hunt from the Wall Street Journal:
"In 1983 the Gipper regaled Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal with his memories of photographing Nazi death camps at the end of the war. But Mr. Reagan never left the country during that war, period."
Like Bush's fake turkey, this story has been so frequently repeated that it is now widely accepted.
But what is the evidence that Reagan made such a claim? ... I have found nothing in the public record to show that the reporters' [apparent] misunderstandings were based directly on a statement by Reagan himself.
The trail of this story inevitably leads back to Louis Cannon's 1991 biography President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime. ... Despite some initial skepticism, however, he accepts the claim that Reagan invented his participation in the filmmaking. Cannon first describes an article in Near East Report ... :
The article said that Reagan had told Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, ... that the roots of his concern for Israel could be traced to World War II when he photographed the Nazi death camps. Afterward, Reagan said, he had saved a copy of the death camp films for himself because he believed that the day would come when people would no longer believe that six million Jews had been exterminated.
Setting aside for a moment the accuracy of Cannon's description, the key element of Reagan's story is clearly the second part about saving a copy of the footage to show to future deniers. ... Surely it is this that Shamir would have found ... "moving ... and had related it to the cabinet as evidence of the president's support of Israel." ...
Cannon's description of the Near East Report article is misleading, however. Here is the relevant section (dated February 10, 1984):
... This does not rule out the possibility that Reagan did say he filmed the camps, but the text fails to justify that assumption. For all we know, Reagan said nothing about making the film, and the reporter made an erroneous inference. ... ...
The lie of Bush's plastic turkey gained traction because it detracted from the positive story of Bush's surprise visit to the troops in Iraq on Thanksgiving 2003. The story of Reagan inventing his role in the filming of the death camps is not as provably false, but its popularity despite the paucity of evidence seems to serve the same purpose: An anecdote that puts President Reagan in a positive light is pushed aside by a dubious story that makes him look foolish. Sadly, in both cases, the media has aided and abetted the misinformation.
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2010/05/blumenthal_reagan_and_the_big.html#ixzz3RAc76kVO
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