Editorials

Incompetence, the Media’s Achilles Heel; Give Ridicule a Chance

As you know, I’m not one to sit around and grouse about the advantage the Left seems to have due to the fact they have the media in their pocket. Today the proof is in the pudding, for the media is at least as responsible for the blowback of 2010 as the Dems in Congress. The same this year, as they have reaped bushels more than they ever sowed.

So, pass around a glass of bubbly and celebrate. Comeuppances come in the strangest ways and we are watching one play out now.

Just let the anger pass away. They aren’t getting away with it. Like everyone else who can remember Bobby, the teacher’s pet, from 4th grade, we all hate to see anyone appear to get away with a lie, but experience teaches us that they usually get it in the end. Just wait it out. We were taught this in Sunday School but we learned it at the Saturday matinee, knowing we had to wait through 50 minutes of crooks getting away with everything before Roy, Hopalong, Lash or Gene finally busted that lying dude right in the mouth, rounded up his gang, then kissed ol’ Trigger or Champ.

We’d always come away telling our buddies it was worth the wait, then we’d save our quarter allowance and go do it all over again next Saturday. It was not until I saw my sons, four years apart, each watch “Star Wars” twenty years later, that I knew that same inner clock for justice resided in them.

The beat goes on, as there will always be Saurons, Wormingtongues and Orcs out there to blight our paths, and there will be likely and unlikely heroes to stand up and beat them in the end and sail off to the Fair Havens in the epilogue.

But the people who fight Evil are those who have to walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, silently biding their time, dodging the Enemy’s arrows while studying the Enemy’s ways…

…which brings me full circle back to the media and the Left. They should be dissected like lab rats (using a rusty butterknife) wherein you’ll discover all sorts of frailties, and several open avenues for attack.

That’s what we should be looking for.

First, there are certain understandings you must subscribe to. One, on average, the Left is not as smart as conservatives. Not even close. And by several yardsticks, not just common sense. Even in book learning they are sadly lacking, including history. Oh, they can be taught facts like 1066 and 1492, or 1940, CliffsNotes stuff, but you can teach monkeys as much. But they cannot reason. As Bernie Chumm said recently, they cannot connect more than two dots, so have to try to survive on as many pre-learned cues as they can to get by.

What they cannot afford to do is get caught out naked. For the most part they try to convey their brilliance by being able to control a narrative, and do 99% of their “talking” in a cocoon, such as the internet, email, Twitter.  When people like us show up, they have a billion factoids at their fingertips, but quickly retreat the minute one of us should ask them to connect that third dot. (Hint: There are no “third dot catechisms” on Wiki.”)

Consequently, they still play at a disadvantage for they are unable to discern between facts and opinions, critical thinking and rote memorization, so often end up quoting Thomas Friedman or Bill Maher as sources of fact.

In short, what they have done is build around themselves a cocoon so they can never be forced to expose their intellectual shortcomings. (This is the key, as I’ll explain.)

Over the years the media has excelled at this. Since the Clinton era, and the advent of lying for the sake of lying, e.g, Hillary being named for a mountain climber several years before he ever climbed Mt Everest, the media has been able 1) to stifle any outrage over lying by simply not reporting the lie, the consequences of the lie, or even the rationale of the lie, and 2) making the lie itself to appear less serious. In short, as long as the people were inundated with innocuous white lies in those days, it was easy to sweep big, serious lies under the rug.

Now the advent of the lie in this Clinton period is interesting, for it wasn’t many years ago the simplest of lies could get a man drummed out of office. Indeed, it was GHW Bush’s “no new taxes” pledge that was heralded as a serious lie by the media, which probably was the single mistake by Bush that handed Clinton the ’92 election. What the media admitted, perhaps unknowingly, was that the “out the mouth” lie by a public figure is still held in low regard by the American culture…but only so long as it is 1) the media themselves who makes the accusation and 2) there is an “out of the mouth” taped and recorded moment. There has to be a visual, or audio at least. This rule disqualifies Rush Limbaugh or you and I from being able to make any claim. Only accredited media can call or infer someone is a liar. (excluding Fox, who is an ideological outlier.)

See how this set-up works?  Yes, it isn’t fair, but as I said, those chickens are about to come home to roost.

The whole of this inquiry into lying isn’t to provide a solution to stop it. At least directly. But they have provided an opening. The media has exposed an Achilles Heel, and pointed the way toward the path to their reduction (I can’t say destruction) which is through this soft underbelly.

The Clinton administration committed lies that were at least as dangerous as the Obama administration has done, the selling (for personal gain) of space and weapons technology to the Chinese high among them.

But in gravity the lying has intensified with this administration, although I have to confess Obama’s autobiography ranks right up there with Hillary’s namesake lie, Bill’s churches burning lie, and the at least 852 “I had a bogey, mmm, lemme count, yep, a bogey 5 on that hole” lies for knee-slapping incredulity.

What is important here is that the media has lost its sense of place, so to speak, and has gone from protector of Democrat’s lies to facilitators of them. But they are still playing by the old rules, as if their fingerprints aren’t all over the place.

Why this is important…I have to take you back to the beginning…is that they have helped create a world where being a liar is no big deal anymore. In their world view of themselves, they believe they can survive (actually step aside) from the outrage that is about to befall the Obama administration and the Left in November. They think they are bigger than Obama, and will survive him. Many of them (the media is people, after all) won’t.

For they have forgotten that the world in which Obama now plays in one entirely of their creation…a completely false and surreal world. But if you recall I wrote earlier “what they have done is build around themselves a cocoon so they can never be forced to expose their intellectual shortcomings.”…meaning inside themselves they all know it is all illusion.

Big, big oops here, folks, for the media has left the administration, across the board, open to the one thing the Left fears most…that they are incompetent.

The Obama people, much like the Clintonistas, could care less that Rush Limbaugh calls them liars, or that we do, or the entire conservative blogosphere, or that even Dr Krauthammer uses up his weekly allotment of “disingenuous” every week by Tuesday. As long as Mitch McConnell or John Boehner cannot stand in the well of their respective chambers and call Obama a liar, and as long as David Gregory, Georgie Stephanopolous, Anderson Cooper, et al don’t call Obama a liar, they don’t care.

Call it a cultural thing, but the Clintons proved this liar-rule with the botched prosecution of the White House Travel Office in 1993. A pure political firing, they decided to cover up the cronyism by declaring that the travel office had stolen money. Caught red-handed in the lie, they proceeded to prosecute instead.

The Travel Office acquitted, the lesson learned was that the Clinton White House (and the whole generation) would much rather be called liars than incompetents.

This is news we can use. Exposure of incompetence is their greatest fear.

Now the Clintons were very competent in politics, but pretty incompetent in governance. But the Obama administration is incompetent top to bottom. Fast and Furious was incompetence on at least three different levels. Solyndra is yet another type of incompetence. And the total destruction of American foreign policy in the Middle East could only be matched by one of C S Foresters mythical central America “el Supremo” dictators in the Horatio Hornblower stories.

I can understand that a Marxist cannot design and build a square peg to fit into the round hole that had been the free market, constitutional design provided by the Founders. But when that square peg is so poorly crafted it won’t even fit into a square hole, we are dealing with incompetence of the highest order.

The bad news is that Rush Limbaugh can’t make this charge. (Actually he can, with just a small shift in nuance.)  Of course, we can’t either. But because it is the incompetence of the media being outed, not Obama, the candidates can, all of them, from Romney-Ryan to local candidates in the districts. Even Mitch McConnell can from the well of the Senate.

Newt almost got it right. The media is no longer spinning lies, it is covering up its own lies. It is not shielding Obama’s incompetence as it did Clinton’s lapses, but rather hiding its own in forwarding false memes about Obama. Every time David Gregory and company pushes an Obama lie the Romney team will be well within bounds to ask why Gregory is so stupid to ask a question about a stupid act he already knows to be stupid.

God, do they hate being made fun of.

So give ridicule a chance, Mitt.

 

 

 

 

 

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