ANNUS 2015 ONLY SEEMED TO BE ANNUS HORRIBILIS

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2015 was an awful year? Look again.

by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
December 30, 2015

http://www.jeffjacoby.com/18316/2015-was-an-awful-year-look-again

OF COURSE 2015 was a miserable year; all years are miserable. It was a year of rampage killings and police brutality, of natural disasters and government corruption. There were ghastly terror attacks and devastating civil wars, floods of refugees and acts of unspeakable cruelty. Airliners were blown out of the sky. Priceless antiquities were destroyed. Politics seethed with incivility. Too many innocents died young, too many officials lied, too many victims suffered.

Yes, bad things happened in 2015. Yet it was still "the best year in history for the average human being to be alive." And 2016 will likely be better still.

You don't have to look far for proof that this has been an annus horribilis, and that things are getting worse. You never do. The conviction of decline routinely grips human beings, even human beings living in an age of progress and safety. The Associated Press once published a news analysis under the headline: "Everything Seemingly Is Spinning Out of Control." The world was going "haywire," the AP observed; people were understandably discouraged by "the onslaught of dispiriting things." As it happens, that article ran in 2008. But an update with the same headline could just as readily be published this year, or any year.
Yet in reality, 2015 was in many ways an annus mirabilis — a year of wonders and blessings. Sample some of the evidence.
• Twelve months ago, West Africa was being racked by the worst epidemic of Ebola disease in recorded history. More than 11,000 people, many of them health workers, were dying of a viral sickness for which no vaccine existed. Today, amazingly, the number of confirmed Ebola cases in West Africa can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and researchers in August reported finding a vaccine that appears to be 100 percent effective in preventing the disease.
• Girls and women in some of the world's hellholes continue to be all too cruelly victimized. On the other hand, female literacy around the planet reached new heights in 2015. As recently as the 1970s, only 40 percent of females age 15 and older could read and write. Just four decades later, according to UNESCO, global female literacy has passed 93 percent.
• In the United States, mass shootings and terrorist assaults took a grim toll this year and drew intense media coverage. But the FBI's newest report on crime in America (compiling data through 2014) shows that violent crime was down, not up. There were fewer homicides and robberies than there had been a year earlier — and far fewer than five and 10 years earlier.
• Thugs with weapons wrought undisputed horrors in places like Syria and Libya, yet there were democratic elections and peaceful transfers of power too — in countries ranging from Nigeria to Argentina to Myanmar to Burkina Faso. And Tunisia's National Dialogue Quartet received the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize for proving that democracy and pluralism could be nurtured even in the Arab world's stony soil.
Pointing to these and other pieces of decidedly good news, economist Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, describes 2015 as "the best year in history for the average human being to be alive." As 2016 approaches, he writes, humankind is "better-educated, better-fed, healthier, freer, and more tolerant" than ever before.
Hard to believe? That's understandable. People are generally more dubious about good news and positive trends. Our species tends to be hardwired for pessimism — a tendency reinforced by the media, which devote far more attention to violence and tragedy than to safety and success. Beheadings dominate news coverage for weeks on end; spectacular medical advances are a one- or two-day story at best.
Men and women have always tended to romanticize the way things were when they were young.
"The humor of blaming the present and admiring the past," the Scottish philosopher David Hume remarked in 1777, "is strongly rooted in human nature." It's an instinct worth resisting. Not because the world is never a messy, scary, tear-filled place, but because it is less so now than it used to be. These really are the good old days. Next year will be even better.
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).

ANN TELNAES AND THE WASHINGTO POST REVEAL BOTH THEIR BIAS AND THEIR STUPIDITY

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• Media

10 Stupidest Things About The Post’s Cartoon Portraying Cruz’s Children As Monkeys

By Mollie Hemingway

December 23, 2015

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This past weekend, Ted Cruz put out a political ad that was actually good and funny. The ad first aired in Iowa during a broadcast of “Saturday Night Live,” a fun take on their ad parodies. You can watch it here:

It features Cruz reading to his family such festive and timeless classics as “How Obamacare Stole Christmas” and “Rudolph the Underemployed Reindeer.” It’s well written and well produced, so of course some people got upset. But no one got quite as upset as Ann Telnaes, an editorial cartoonist whose work is frequently featured at The Washington Post. So mad, in fact, that she inexplicably portrayed Cruz as an organ grinder whose children were monkeys on leashes. To make a long story short, The Washington Post ended up pulling the cartoon, which was actually an animated GIF for the full “Ted Cruz’s children are monkeys!” effect.

There are so many things wrong with Telnaes’ cartoon and the subsequent defense of it that it’s hard to know where to begin, but let’s just dig in.

1) All Politicians Put Their Families In Their Ads

Telnaes is a Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist, so I’m surprised she didn’t know this, but something approaching 100 percent of all politicians feature family members in political ads. So unless Telnaes was born on Saturday, there is no excuse for being ignorant of this. Maybe she should read her own newspaper for an explanation of this thing she thinks Cruz invented:

2) Children Are Off Limits

You don’t have to abide by these rules, of course, but one key rule governing civilized behavior by the media is that kids are off limits. Many hours before anyone had noticed Telnaes’ cartoons (her cartoons are boring and usually not worth paying attention to), she tweeted out a pre-emptive defense and pre-emptive justification for why she broke this rule.

Again, I believe this was many, many hours before the cartoon was noticed by anyone — perhaps before it was even published — so the defensiveness on display was probably some vestigial conscience showing up. She was also quoted by CNN as saying she thought that the kids were, and I quote, “fair game” because of the ad that showed them being cute and funny. Since all politicians put their kids (and grandkids!) in ads, and this was just a particularly effective featuring of the same, this makes you wonder just how ideologically blinded Telnaes might be. Gabriel Malor had an interesting series of tweets on this matter that I will condense here:

The core problem here is that Ann Telnaes has no moral foundation. She knows there are rules, but she doesn’t know *why* there are rules. So Telnaes simply thought she could reason her way to an exception to the rule: kids are off limits. But her reasoning — Cruz did it, so they’re fair game — does not actually address the reason for the rule. The reason, in case you were wondering, why kids are off limits is because they lack culpability AND the capacity to respond. That Cruz cast his children in a good light does not mean that Telnaes is relieved of the rule protecting them from being cast negatively. Telnaes doesn’t understand this bc, again, she doesn’t know *why* we have the rule, only that there is one. She lacks a moral foundation.

Just because the Cruz kids are adorable and funny doesn’t mean you can go after them any more than you can go after Sasha and Malia for being adorable when pulled out on stage at political events either.

3) Monkeys? Really?

As if going after children weren’t enough, Telnaes thought it would be a grand idea to portray the daughters of the first Hispanic senator from Texas as monkeys. I’m not sure if the dehumanization was done because of that, because of their father’s politics or some other reason, but it compounds the error in ways that make you wonder how in the heck the cartoon received editorial approval from The Washington Post.

Just in general, journalists should avoid portraying and mocking the kids of politicians, including the kids of Hispanic politicians, as dancing monkeys. Does this really need to be said to Pulitzer Prize-winning elites? I guess so.

4) It’s Not Funny

This is actually quite important. The Washington Post has always been a bad page for editorial cartooning. For something like 60 years they featured the ghastly work of HERBLOCK, whose distinctions were drawing like a particularly uncreative five-year-old and labeling literally everything in said drawings. Partly he needed to label because he lacked any imagination at all and kept pushing out the same clichéd metaphor for…everything. Partly, some suspected, it was because he was huffing airplane glue. If you’d like some delicious take-downs of HERBLOCK (his name was Herbert Block, so this all-block-letter-combo-name thing gives you an indication of his dazzling intellect), I’d recommend “Cartoons Without Humor: The underwhelming oeuvre of Herblock, America’s worst political cartoonist” and “Washington’s Blockheads: The perpetual adulation of Herblock.” From the latter, by the great Andy Ferguson:

Vampire bats sweep across a skyline, their bellies covered in writing: “takeover tactics,” “raiders,” “greenmail specialists,” “junk bond finances,” and “stock manipulations.” (This must be Wall Street!) And there’s always a caption, too, another 15 or 20 words. “If you don’t get my meaning,” Block seems to be saying to his reader, “I’m going to make you sit here until you do.” It was his politics, mostly, that lifted Herblock above his lack of technical skill to the Pulitzers and the medals and the honorary degrees. His ideas were as simple as his draftsmanship, and perfectly matched to the prejudices of the powerful journalists he hoped to please.

All of which to say, Telnaes reminds me a lot of HERBLOCK. She can draw better than he could (all humans can), but her ideas are just as predictably progressive, clichéd, hyper-partisan, and so on. She obsesses over the same, few causes (supporting abortion is her favorite and disdaining Christians is right up there, too). In fact, her attacks on pro-lifers are so hackneyed that nobody will be surprised that she’s been given awards by the country’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood. (Interestingly, this pro-abortion cartoon, which passes for perceptive at The Washington Post, also features children on strings, which says nothing about pro-lifers but a great deal about Telnaes.)

5) It’s Overexplained

Another way that Telnaes is as bad as HERBLOCK is the way she has to explain her cartoons. The cartoon makes no sense on its own because normal people know that all politicians have their kids help them pardon turkeys, appear in campaign ads, and whatnot. So she kept trying to explain it in all of these tweets and remarks she made. If your cartoon doesn’t work on its own, scrap the idea. Also if it’s racist, scrap it.

6) Did Any Other Politicians Feature Children In Their Campaigns Yesterday?

Wait, what’s this?

Oh, Hillary Clinton put out a picture of herself with her older grandchild (the second one is due this summer) as part of a campaign called “7 things Hillary Clinton has in common with your abuela”? I can’t wait for Telnaes to take her to task for exploiting these grandchildren!

7) It’s The Ghastly Double Standards

Last year, a low-level Capitol Hill staffer made some critiques on Facebook of how Obama’s daughters were handling themselves during a political event. The Washington Post more or less lost its mind. I wrote about it a few days after the story broke in the piece, “Dear Media, This Nonsense Is Why Everybody Hates You.” They had already run something like 14 stories on the matter, including having a reporter dig up dirt from the staffer’s adolescence. It was disgusting. As I wrote then:

I’d like someone to go ahead and circle back with [Post Executive Editor Martin] Baron and have him explain himself. In what world — in what mother-freaking world — does he justify taking a foreign affairs reporter and having him dig up dirt on a low-level former staffer who said nothing worse about presidential children than the Post’s own columnists did in the Bush era? One of the items linked above is a Ruth Marcus column where she bashes this low-level staffer for critiquing the daughters, then notes she herself did it to the Bush girls –including attacking them for showing so much “cleavage,” being churlish, and their speaking style — but that it was OK because she did it under the guise of parody and they had notable busts. I’m not joking. You can read it for yourself. As John Podhoretz said, “Ruth Marcus’s double standard FOR HERSELF is absolutely astonishing.”

It’s so tiring, so unbelievably tiring. Everyone knows that there is one standard for how you may treat the children of Democratic candidates and an entirely separate and unrelated one for how you treat the children of Republican candidates. The disparity of standards is even more dramatic for progressive versus conservative candidates and their families.

8) Media Coverage

Another tiring thing is the frame offered by the media for covering this. When a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist with media elite friends pens a cartoon portraying the children of a Hispanic senator as dancing monkeys, what should the headline and lede be? CNN went with “Washington Post pulls cartoon depicting Ted Cruz’s daughters.” I guess they thought adding the words “as monkeys” would have made it too descriptive. But note the lede: Yes, the newsworthy thing is that Cruz obtained new ammo to shoot at the media. Wait, what? I…I… I…honestly don’t know what to say to this. Also, in what sense are they portrayed as “monkey-like” creatures and not “monkeys”? I have no idea what is meant by this, although the reporter goes on to describe them as being portrayed as “two hatted creatures,” which is, again, quite weird. Many media outlets were reticent to mention the monkey problem. For example:

Why would Cruz be upset at a cartoonist for drawing his daughters? Oh, she caricatured them crudely as “chained dancing apes“? Why, that changes everything and should probably be what you lead with, eh? (In Politico’s defense, they later updated the story to not only mention the monkeys, unlike the first version online, but to emphasize it.) In any case, this focus on Cruz being inexplicably upset (or is it “gaining ammo”?) instead of on the fact that a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist portrayed his children as chained monkeys is part of a pattern of disparity. The initial story should be the fact of the cartoon running, not Cruz’s reaction to it.

9) Ridiculous Defenses

Telnaes was deleting tweets last night as she managed to convince no one of her cause (I’m sure Vox or Salon or The New Republic are working on it as we speak), but she put a note on Facebook telling people to stop complaining about the cartoon. And she put these tweets on Twitter: Um, no. The lower tweet looks like an attempt to portray herself as a victim, something made ever-so-slightly difficult by going after a pre-schooler and a seven-year-old in that day’s work. The upper is so stupid — yet presented as if it’s somehow informative if not erudite — as to be hilarious. But perhaps more disconcerting is the editor’s note for why they pulled the cartoon:

Editor’s note from Fred Hiatt: It’s generally been the policy of our editorial section to leave children out of it. I failed to look at this cartoon before it was published. I understand why Ann thought an exception to the policy was warranted in this case, but I do not agree.

What’s this “I understand why Ann thought an exception to the policy was warranted” business? That’s, again, just stupid. Politicians feature their children in ads all the time, as the easy-to-find examples of Obama and Clinton demonstrate above. What is there to “understand” about Ann’s perspective, exactly?

Further, is the only thing worth noting about this cartoon that it went after children? I mean, the same editorial page wrote a story just a few short months ago about how it was pretty sure Cruz was using a racial dog-whistle in an ad, although it couldn’t quite figure out exactly how. (I’m actually making the editorial seem like it made more sense than it did.) It said the ad only seemed to be about terrorism but was probably also a racist attack on Latino immigrants, Syrian refugees, or Iranian Muslims. They didn’t know which, but they were pretty sure that it was one of them enough to call the ad “revolting.”

But portray some Latino kids as dancing, chained monkeys and the only thing you can say is “leave children out of it”? Really? Such funny dog-whistle-hearing capabilities at the Post there, eh? Almost seems to fit a pattern, no? I’ll only add that a search for “dog whistle” on the Post’s search mechanism returns more than 500 results since 2005 alone.

10) Problems At The Washington Post

In Hiatt’s odd note that raises more questions than it answers, left unnamed are the editors who did look at it prior to publication. I have no reason to doubt Hiatt that he didn’t personally review the cartoon before it ran. Sometimes editors can’t review everything. But some editors reviewed it before it ran, even if they aren’t named Fred Hiatt. Presumably many eyes were on that cartoon before it ran.

Was there no one to say, “Maybe we shouldn’t publish the racist thing”? Is everyone reviewing what goes up so far left that they didn’t see the problem with this unfair attack on the Cruz family? Is everyone so stupid and uninformed to not know that 100 percent of all politicians feature family members in ads?

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is a senior editor at The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter at @mzhemingway

Ann Telnaes cartooning HERBLOCK racism Ted Cruz

THREE WORDS OBAMA CANNOT PRONOUNCE: MUSLIM ISLAMIC TERRORIST

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We Just Can't Seem To "Pin-Point" The Problem...

The Shoe Bomber was a Muslim.

The Beltway Snipers were Muslims.

The Fort Hood Shooter was a Muslim.

The Underwear Bomber was a Muslim.

The U-S.S. Cole Bombers were Muslims.

The Madrid Train Bombers were Muslims.

The Bali Nightclub Bombers were Muslims.

The London Subway Bombers were Muslims.

The Moscow Theater Attackers were Muslims.

The Boston Marathon Bombers were Muslims.

The Pan-Am flight #93 Bombers were Muslims.

The Air France Entebbe Hijackers were Muslims.

The Iranian Embassy Takeover, was by Muslims.

The Beirut U.S. Embassy bombers were Muslims.

The Libyan U.S. Embassy Attack was by Muslims.

The Buenos Aires Suicide Bombers were Muslims.

The Israeli Olympic Team Attackers were Muslims.

The Kenyan U.S, Embassy Bombers were Muslims.

The Saudi, Khobar Towers Bombers were Muslims.

The Beirut Marine Barracks bombers were Muslims.

The Besian Russian School Attackers were Muslims.

The first World Trade Center Bombers were Muslims.

The Bombay & Mumbai India Attackers were Muslims.

The Achille Lauro Cruise Ship Hijackers were Muslims.

The September 11th 2001 Airline Hijackers were Muslims.

 

THINK ABOUT THIS:

 

Buddhists living with Hindus = No Problem.

Hindus living with Christians = No Problem.

Hindus living with Jews = No Problem.

Christians living with Shintos = No Problem.

Shintos living with Confucians = No Problem.

Confucians living with Bahai = No Problem.

Bahai living with Jews = No Problem.

Jews living with Atheists = No Problem.

Atheists living with Buddhists = No Problem.

Buddhists living with Sikhs = No Problem.

Sikhs living with Hindus = No Problem.

Hindus living with Bahai = No Problem.

Bahai living with Christians = No Problem.

Christians living with Jews = No Problem.

Jews living with Buddhists = No Problem.

Buddhists living with Shintos = No Problem.

Shintos living with Atheists = No Problem.

Atheists living with Confucians = No Problem.

Confucians living with Hindus = No Problem.

 

BUT  

 

Muslims living with Hindus = Problem.

Muslims living with Buddhists = Problem.

Muslims living with Christians = Problem.

Muslims living with Jews = Problem.

Muslims living with Sikhs = Problem.

Muslims living with Bahai = Problem.

Muslims living with Shintos = Problem.

Muslims living with Atheists = Problem.

MUSLIMS LIVING WITH MUSLIMS = BIG PROBLEM!

 

SO THIS LEADS TO 

 

They're not happy in Gaza.

They're not happy in Egypt.

They're not happy in Libya.

They're not happy in Morocco.

They're not happy in Iran.

They're not happy in Iraq.

They're not happy in Yemen.

They're not happy in Afghanistan.

They're not happy in Pakistan.

They're not happy in Syria.

They're not happy in Lebanon.

They're not happy in Nigeria.

They're not happy in Kenya.

They're not happy in Sudan.

 

SO, WHERE ARE THEY HAPPY? 

 

They're happy in Australia.

They're happy in England.

They're happy in Belgium.

They're happy in France.

They're happy in Italy.

They're happy in Germany.

They're happy in Sweden.

They're happy in the USA & Canada.

They're happy in Norway & India.

They're happy in almost every country that is not Islamic!

 

AND, WHO DO THEY NOT BLAME? 

 

Not Islam.

Not their leadership.

Not themselves, or their unfounded HATRED.

They blame the countries that they are happy in!

They want to change the countries they're happy in, to be like the countries they came from where they were unhappy! 

     And, the extremists among them want the world under SHARIA LAW;   the most  OPPRESSIVE, INTOLERANT, UNFORGIVING, set of rules in the history of the world, AND, we bury our heads in the sand and pretend that THEY ARE NOT AT WAR WITH US?  

              

 

Islamic Jihad:  AN ISLAMIC TERROR ORGANIZATION.

ISIS:  AN ISLAMIC TERROR ORGANIZATION.

Al-Qaeda:  AN ISLAMIC TERROR ORGANIZATION.

Taliban:  AN ISLAMIC TERROR ORGANIZATION.

Hamas:  AN ISLAMIC TERROR ORGANIZATION.

Hezbollah:  AN ISLAMIC TERROR ORGANIZATION.

Boko Haram:  AN ISLAMIC TERROR ORGANIZATION.

Al-Nusra:  AN ISLAMIC TERROR ORGANIZATION.

Abu Sayyaf:  AN ISLAMIC TERROR ORGANIZATION.

Al-Badr:  AN ISLAMIC TERROR ORGANIZATION.

Muslim Brotherhood:  AN ISLAMIC TERROR ORGANIZATION.

Lashkar-e-Taiba:  AN ISLAMIC TERROR ORGANIZATION.

Palestine Liberation Front:  AN ISLAMIC TERROR  ORGANIZATION

Ansaru: AN ISLAMIC TERROR ORGANIZATION.

Jemaah Islamiyah:   AN ISLAMIC TERROR ORGANIZATION.

Abdullah Azzam Brigades:  AN ISLAMIC TERROR ORGANIZATION.

 

But again, we just can’t figure out who's causing the problem?

A DUCK THAT LOOKS LIKE A LAME DUCK, QUACKS LIKE A LAME DUCK AND ACTS LIKE A LAME DUCK, IS A LAME DUCK

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All That’s Left Is the Bitterness

BY Noah Rothman 

COMMENTARY MAGAZINE

 Nov. 10, 2015

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[ Emphasis {commentary} in red type by Leo Rugiens }

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Last night, the promise of Barack Obama’s presidency was fully exhausted.
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The president had strived in the wake of his party’s second consecutive midterm drubbing to portray himself as an indefatigable warrior who would not succumb to the same lame duck syndrome that afflicted his two-term predecessors {especially Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton}.
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Disillusioned with the delineation of powers, Obama sought to demonstrate his force of will by expending as much executive authority as he could get away with – even if that meant running afoul of the Constitution he swore to uphold and protect. 
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The climax of Obama’s caudillo act came when he signed a series of “executive actions” – one dare not call them executive orders, for that implies their legitimacy – pertaining to the status of several classes of illegal immigrants. Obama declared his intention to interpret broadly his discretionary authority to enforce existing immigration law and simply insisted that some of those laws were to be ignored. 

On Monday night, a three-judge panel on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an injunction on those actions. The president, for all his accumulated powers that would surely make the Founders cringe, had been checked by a co-equal branch; his “executive actions” will remain blunted if and until the Supreme Court weighs in on the matter.
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Perhaps there remain a handful of holdouts that still believe Obama’s potential might eventually be realized, but most Americans have come to terms with the president’s unmet expectations.
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Conservatives, even those who were temporarily swayed by the passions of 2008, long ago accepted that the president was no competent steward of American affairs. Progressives who once saw Obama as their savior have now embraced the flesh-and-blood expression of angst that is Bernie Sanders, in part as a vehicle to register their dissatisfaction with Obama and his anointed heir {Hillary Clinton}.
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Only a waning and unwittingly humorous cast of true believers still hope that the president might fulfill their expectancies, but they are only kidding themselves. The court’s thwarting of Obama’s will is a fine example of how his most ballyhooed legacy achievements are being methodically torn down around him. These so-called accomplishments were hard-won, and they left in their wakes substantial acrimony and division. The status quo ante is gone; it will not return. Rather than leave behind him a set of progressive accomplishment and a nation appreciably more left-of-center than he found it, Barack Obama might end up leaving behind him only the bitterness he roused.

HIGHER EDUCATION IN THE U.S. IS INTRODUCTION TO INSANITY 101

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HIGHER ED GONE WILD:
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  [ Emphasis {commentary} in red type by Leo Rugiens ]
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Rob Tracinski wrote yesterday that Mizzou and Yale show why it’s time to burn universities to the ground. http://vlt.tc/26at  Today, Joy Pullmann argues that the cause could be in part due to the modern Mommy Wars, and the inability of kids to learn the need to self-regulate. http://vlt.tc/26ch  Whatever the case in these specific instances, the overall story from these and other institutions over the course of the past several years provides plenty of examples of what happens when a half century of monolithic progressive leadership for institutions metastasizes, creating a level of thought-policing more invasive than ever, encroaching on every action and aspect of student life.
 
There is no place for academic freedom in such a place: there is only the constant tug of war over safe spaces, speech codes, thought crimes, infringement, victimhood, and privilege. The students at the University of Missouri the other day were singing “We shall overcome” and chanting calls for “revolution”. The normal rebelliousness of youth is all fine and good, until they start demanding people be the next up against the wall.
 
And that’s what they did in this case, forcing the University of Missouri system president to resign, for no particular reason and not because he did anything particularly egregious. http://vlt.tc/26bq  “Not everyone was pleased with the resignations. W. Dudley McCarter, a former president of the university’s alumni group, said alumni, in calls and emails on Monday, had expressed disappointment in Mr. Wolfe’s decision. “They feel like he was backed into a corner and was made a scapegoat for things he didn’t do,” Mr. McCarter said.”  More here. http://vlt.tc/26ba

As David French notes, the idea that President Tim Wolfe was the problem doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. http://vlt.tc/26cb  “The idea that Wolfe presided over a racially insensitive educational empire is a sad joke. A timeline of racial outrages in Columbia is sparse indeed, showing two allegations of racial name-calling (on a campus with 35,000 students) and one disturbing incident in which a swastika was drawn on a dorm wall with human waste. No rational, sentient human being believes system presidents can be responsible for what lunatics do with their own feces, or that they can prevent any given student from shouting racial slurs. Not even the worst communist dictatorships could control the speech of all their subjects. Wolfe couldn’t stop drunk undergraduates from hurling insensitive insults even if he established his own gulag and deployed commissars across campus.”

Unfortunately, the blood of the scapegoat shows little sign of satisfying the mob – it never really does. Here’s the Mizzou media professor and others who tried to block a student photographer from covering their safe space event. http://vlt.tc/26bo  “On Monday afternoon, activists who had demanded Wolfe’s resignation abruptly demanded that media stop covering their activities on the public campus of the taxpayer-funded university. At the center of those demands was Melissa Click, an assistant professor of mass media within Mizzou’s communications department. In the video below, you can see Click ask for “muscle” to help her bully a Mizzou student into not covering the ongoing mob protests…

“They have an education to get and a life to live,” a woman identified as Janna Basler, the assistant director of Greek Life & Leadership at the university, yelled at the photographer… “You are infringing on what they need right now, which is to be alone,” Basler, a taxpayer-funded university employee, said of the assembled crowd. Basler did not elaborate on how participation in a large, anti-speech mob was consistent with needing to be alone.” The struggle goes on. http://vlt.tc/26c7
 

THE LYING LIBERAL MEDIA LOONIES ARE LOOSE ON THE LAND

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How Do You Solve A Problem Like The Media?

The attacks on Ben Carson are twenty-first-century American media in a nutshell: we got it wrong, but we were still right.

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November 9, 2015

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By Daniel Payne

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THE FEDERALIST

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I never intended to become the go-to guy for defending Ben Carson, but in the pages of this august publication I have already done so twice. Carson is not my first choice for candidate. He is not even in my top five. But the treatment this man has received from the media and pundit class has frequently been so dishonest and unfair that it seems necessary to come to his defense.
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Grilling a presidential candidate is the media’s job, of course, but they have a responsibility to do so fairly and with a modicum of professional dignity. Carson’s critics have often cheerfully abandoned both of these notions. For Carson’s troubles, we can only hope that President Rubio—in either his first or second term—offers the good doctor some kind of suitable sinecure in one of the few bureaucracies that President Rubio will have not defunded and shut down.
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Start with the Politico Fiasco

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Last week saw the latest attack on Carson, a partisan hit-piece so breathtakingly transparent that it makes Joseph Pulitzer’s yellow journalism look like a reflective essay in the Virginia Quarterly Review. Politico’s Kyle Cheney published an article so earnest in its dishonesty that you almost believe Cheney himself bought it. According to the report, Carson had been lying for years about his application, admission, and offer of a “full scholarship” to West Point.
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As it turns out, however, Carson never applied, and there are no records of him having been offered a “full scholarship” to the military academy. Carson’s campaign affirmed that, yes, Carson had never applied; Cheney interpreted this as Carson’s “admitting” that the doctor had “fabricated” the story; Politico ran to press with the scoop, and everyone lost their minds over the lying Ben Carson and his lying autobiography.
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Of course, ‘Ben Carson was kind of mildly confused about West Point when he was a teenager’ does not have the same ring to it.

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Except it turns out that the entire premise of Cheney’s piece was fatally flawed. Carson never claimed to have “applied” to West Point, and in fact on several occasions has affirmed that he only ever applied to one college (it was Yale). Barring any damning evidence to the contrary, it is obvious what happened: Carson was encouraged by a military general to attend West Point and assured that, should he choose to go, all his expenses would be paid (as is the custom at West Point).
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Carson interpreted this as a “full scholarship,” leading to the relevant passage in his book. That’s it—that’s the only story that was here. But, of course, “Ben Carson was kind of mildly confused about West Point when he was a teenager” does not have the same ring to it.
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So Politico ran with it—and slandered Carson in an almost-galactic scale: the piece was shared nearly 80,000 times on Facebook alone. After pushback from Carson and his campaign, the website added a lame editor’s note that (a) acknowledged the fraudulent premise of the article, and (b) declared that Politico “stands by its reporting.” This is twenty-first-century American media in a nutshell: we got it wrong, but we were still right.

That Wasn’t the Only Thing

Elsewhere, a new accusation was hurled Carson’s way: there were suspicions that a story from his youth—in which he tried to stab someone in a fit of anger and eventually found religion as a result—was also fabricated. As it turns out, this story, too, seems to be true: years ago, Carson’s mother herself corroborated the story. Which is to say, Carson’s honesty and integrity were yet again dragged through the mud before the media could be bothered to do its job.
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It may be happening again on a third question, of whether an incident Carson described as having happened at Yale really did. Again, he’s been accused and again produced evidence for his claims.
With all of this is mind—along with the countless other instances of unprofessionalism, bias, and hostility towards conservatives that we see almost every day—here are three good rules to follow if you’re consuming any kind of media from the mainstream, especially when it involves reporting on conservatives or conservative principles in any way.

1. Be Skeptical of What You’re Reading

This doesn’t mean you have to assume that all members of the media are liars, or that they’re as dishonest and unprofessional as Cheney. But a great many journalists and pundits are either unwilling or incapable of doing fair reportage on many topics, particularly those that involve conservative issues or conservative people.
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A great many journalists and pundits are either unwilling or incapable of doing fair reportage.

The Planned Parenthood undercover videos exposed the media’s incompetence and bias to a startling degree. We saw the same thing regarding the Rolling Stone University of Virginia rape hoax, which pushed a feminist narrative without bothering to check the facts, and elsewhere we’ve seen reporters cheerfully happy to carry water for pro-abortion politicians.
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Does this mean you can’t trust anything the media reports on? Of course not. But when it comes to controversial political topics that involve important facts and details, it is perfectly reasonable to assume that much if not most of the media might be somewhat untrustworthy. You don’t want to adopt a cynical, wild-eyed paranoia about what’s being reported in your local newspaper or favorite news network, but a healthy skepticism can be a great boon when it comes to reportage on politics and politicians.
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2. Armed with Your Skepticism, Read Very Carefully

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I am ashamed to say it, but I was initially taken in by the Carson story. It seemed like the man had been caught red-handed. But then people started pointing out the inconsistencies between what Carson had said and what Politico said he said. After going back and reading the piece a few more times, it was clear how completely wrong and dishonest Cheney’s reporting had been.
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We should be especially careful about things that appear to validate our preexisting beliefs.

It can be easy sometimes to gloss over an article when you think you’ve got the gist of it. This goes double when it seems like your biases are being confirmed. I like Carson a great deal, but I have a low political opinion of him, so it seemed like my opinion was being validated. Having slowed down and re-read the material, it became obvious not just how bad Cheney’s piece was, but also how quickly I’d accepted its premise because of my own feelings and opinions.
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We all do this, but it’s worthwhile to try and curb this tendency. We should read everything carefully, of course, but we should be especially careful about things that appear to validate our preexisting beliefs, and we should double that carefulness when it comes to the media’s reporting on conservative candidates or conservative political causes.
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3. Read the Source Material

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It has been liberal and feminist dogma for years that the so-called “campus rape epidemic” is mostly driven by “repeat” or “serial” offenders—a small number of criminals who repeatedly and freely prey upon the female college population. This has been elevated to the level of Facts Everyone Knows, and it is endlessly repeated by left-leaning and feminist crusaders in print, online, and on television.
Earlier this year, however, Linda LeFauve of Davidson College took a look at the 2002 study by David Lisak that makes this “repeat offender” claim. Lisak’s findings have been cited by anti-rape activists for over a decade. LeFauve found that “the paper relies on survey data not collected by Lisak, with no direct connection to campus sexual assault.” So it turns out:

The most widely quoted figures—that 90 percent of campus rapes are committed by serial offenders and that they average six rapes each—were calculated on a total of 76 non-traditional students who were not living on a college campus, and whose offenses may or may not have happened on or near a college campus, may or may not have been perpetrated on other students, and may have happened at any time in the survey respondents’ adult lives.

Needless to say, with these revelations, the widely-known and -accepted “repeat offender” statistic has been called into serious question. Lisak has been mostly silent on the matter, but it seems as if his research was deeply flawed and his conclusions were wildly off-base.
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If someone had looked into this sooner, we might have been saved from almost a decade and a half of a false, misleading statistic.

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Nonetheless, it took 13 years for someone to figure this out. Why? Because apparently nobody bothered to check the source material. Nobody bothered to follow the paper trail of this extraordinary “90 percent” claim. If someone had looked into this sooner, we might have been saved from almost a decade and a half of a false, misleading statistic.
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This is why it’s necessary to read the source material. If a pundit should cite a study favorable to his or her conclusions, check it out. This goes double if it’s one of those “everyone knows” statistics. The same goes for other types of source material. If I’d sat down to the relevant passage from Carson’s autobiography, it would have been obvious that the accusations being leveled against him were wrong, and I wouldn’t have embarrassed myself by eagerly sharing the story.
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In other words: do your homework. Some of the time it won’t amount to anything. But lots of times you’ll realize how wrong certain conclusions really are.
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As I said, you don’t want to make yourself paranoid that the media are 100 percent liars 100 percent of the time. That would not be helpful, and it simply isn’t true. You do not want to be paranoid and insulated from so much media. But neither should you accept everything uncritically, without an eye towards the fact that a great many members of the Fourth Estate are biased, unfair, unprofessional, and happy to publish incorrect or misleading information if it gets the results they want. This is true now more than ever.
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So be critical of what you’re reading, watching, or listening to—for Ben Carson, and for who inevitably comes after him.
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Daniel Payne is a senior contributor at The Federalist. He currently runs the blog Trial of the Century, and lives in Virginia. Follow Daniel on Twitter.