| he Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy
Susanna links to a piece by Harry Stein that accomplishes the amazing feat of freezing my very marrow while simultaneously making my blood boil. Every last one of you should read this in full; it's longish, but it's also absolutely vital to the ongoing process of understanding who the true enemies of free thought really are.
It's the tale of a smear campaign launched (on the flimsiest of pretexts) against Stein, a former liberal who dared to mention the novel Huck Finn in less than completely horror-stricken tones at a speaking engagement in, of all places, Texas. But it's far more than just that: the subtext is the story of a preemptive strike against Bob McTeer, a friend of Stein's who might be in line for the job of Fed chairman after Greenspan goes away, and who is not at all palatable to the politically-correct liberals who run the mainstream media. As Stein himself says, look for allegations of racism to be splashed all over the place if he should ever actually be nominated.
Stein tried to get in touch with the ******* (I wish I could come up with a better epithet than that one, but there's just no other way to put it) who wrote the story, a subhuman buttplug (hey - I found one after all!) named Mike Lee of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The "reporter" promised to call Stein back before the piece was published and get Stein's response to it. Naturally, he didn't. After the story was published, then spread all over the country by outraged newsies (it was even checked into by staffers for the absolutely heinous Maxine Waters, who just might be the biggest and most complete disgrace ever to sit in either House of the US Congress), Stein got hold of Lee again to complain about the complete misrepresentation of his remarks, with this disgusting result:
Working the phone to report this article strengthened my resolve. William Jones of San Francisco, the man whose remarks after my speech started it all, never returned my calls. I did reach Mike Lee, the reporter for the Star-Telegram, who picked up his own phone. In the 15 or so minutes we talked, there were many silences from his end, repeated suggestions that I take the matter up with his editor, and a slew of non-answers. Why hadn’t he called back as he said he would? “I thought I did. It’s been a while.” You saw a video of the speech: was there anything even remotely racist about it? “I don’t think we called you a racist.” But you very strongly implied I was, didn’t you? That was certainly the impression everyone seemed to get. A very long silence. “I think you should talk to Lois,” he said for the fourth time.
Lee is nothing more or less than a complete punk. "Uhh, gee, I thought I called you. Well, I know I did, but your machine picked up, and I didn't leave a message because..." In a better, more civilized time, Stein would have demanded satisfaction from Lee and would no doubt have ended up stomping a mudhole in his worthless *** and then walking it dry. Nobody would have been the least bit shocked or dismayed by that either. I'd have been willing to drive great distances to see it, myself. I'd hope there'd be people selling hot dogs and beer.
Stein then tried to take it up with the editor, with the same disgusting result:
Lois Norder, the Star-Telegram’s northeast editor, embodied every one of the attitudes—the smug self-assurance, the presumption to superior virtue, the pose (in the face of an avalanche of evidence to the contrary) of disinterested objectivity—that makes so many dislike today’s mainstream press. Her position was that since the paper had never explicitly called me a racist (or, at any rate, hadn’t used the actual word), my complaints about the piece’s objectivity were unfounded. When I asked Norder whether she herself thought Huck Finn was a racist book, her frigid, expressionless voice got even flatter. “The story is well sourced,” she said dismissively. “The story is fair.”
“Fair! Doesn’t the truth of what happened even matter? You guys wanted to stir up a controversy when there wasn’t anything there—and that’s what you did!” She didn’t miss a beat. “As a journalist, you should understand that someone involved in something does not have an unbiased view. You’re seeing it through your filter. Our job is not to see it through any filter.”
So there it was: not only was I (at the very least) racially insensitive; I wasn’t even a serious person. And what was most unsettling, finally, was that the woman probably wasn’t even being cynical. Given her conception of her role as a journalist, she probably didn’t experience a flicker of self-doubt or bad conscience; after all, the P.C. filter through which she sees the world not only presumes that every accusation of bigotry is valid but that anyone who doesn’t toe the liberal line is fair game.
"Our job is not to see it through any filter." What a smug, smarmy, self-righteous cooze. This arrogant thug has the unbounded gall to actually accuse Stein of bias while defending the indefensible bias at work in her own paper! She's not only ignoring the beam in her own eye, she's actually wielding it like a club to swat at her victim. Outrageous.
Incompetent media scum like Lee and Norder hide behind cries of "censorship" and First Amendment protections whenever they're called to account for their attempts to unjustly discredit and destroy people who disagree with them. Their bias is obvious. Their professional integrity is oxymoronic. Their cowardice is manifest. They are the enemy of every thinking person who respects truth and reveres liberty, free thought, and honest, unfettered debate.
And the truly awful thing is, they are blithely running the risk of systematically destroying one of our most precious freedoms - freedom of the press - by simply pissing all over it. Their partisan axe-grinding makes it all too easy to countenance placing restrictions on the press to ensure some sort of responsible exercise of said freedom. These power-drunk elitists are not only an enemy of freedom, they're a ****ed dangerous one. Anybody who has ever experienced the nightmare that Stein did (and that McTeer surely will, should he ever be nominated for higher office) can vouch for that.
Somehow, someway, these people have to be stopped. ****ed if I know how to do it without trampling on something precious, something that's vital to the very fabric of our Constitutional system. But sooner or later, these moral pygmies are going to get quite a shock when they find out just how sick of them we all are, and how far many Americans would be willing to go to reign them in in the name of bringing back some sort of sanity and sense of propriety to the world of journalism. It'll be a sad day for America when it happens. But I suppose we'll all be able to take some comfort, albeit of the coldest sort, from bitterly enjoying the spectacle of seeing these arrogant creeps hung from the gibbet of their own sanctimonious hypocrisy. | |
