READING YET ANOTHER journalist complaining that Kamala Harris's "closing message" has "fallen short" which, if you think about it in the context of Donald Trump and J. D. Vance means absolutely nothing, I remembered the very first blog post I wrote on a Saturday, May 13, 2006 and the thing that finally got me to write something like that and post it, listening to NPR's Saturday Edition hack Scott Simon holding up liberals to a standard that required the highest standards of accuracy, veracity, and adherence to some absurd standard of imaginary purity that he, the rest of the hacks at NPR and, in fact, just about the entirety of the media never, once held a conservative or a Republican-fascist to once in the history of American mass media or narrow media.
So here almost twenty years later if anything that's gotten worse. I'll repost that very first blog piece I wrote only for "liberal" you should understand it to mean Democrat, Democrats and Democratic in the context of late October 2024.
To start with, there are two things about the Code of Liberal Ethics that bother me. One, that we are supposed to be entirely fair to everyone and especially in instances when that would put us at a disadvantage, will be dealt with later. The one I will deal with first is the assumption that liberals must get it right every time, not only right but correct. That liberals and leftists, such as myself, must be purer than pure or relegated to the tip, is something I'd better address right now in this first post.
I have no intention of getting it right every time. I begin with no expectation of getting it entirely right a plurality of the time. No guarantee of such is given or offered. I will not allow considerations of the possibility of failure from keeping me from action. On occasion I'll plow straight ahead if conditions seem to warrant it. I, friends, am the thoroughly bad sort and claim as mine, as the sacred possession of every liberal and leftist, the absolute right enjoyed by the rest of humanity to get it wrong. And not only this but I claim as the birthright of leftists to present our side of things to the advantage of our side. I have absolutely no intention to be fair to fascists either, but that's for another day and I hope that Nat Hentoff doesn't die before I get to it.
The Code of Liberal Ethics is a standard operating setting required in every organ of the media. It is applied without consideration, without thought, as a matter of habit. It is a solid state component of the minds of far too many liberals. It is a weapon used exclusively against liberals and leftists and is applied to no other segment of the political spectrum. Everyone, from mushy moderate to rabid fascist is allowed their failings and their biases. But not liberals. Certainly not leftists.
No more. Here, today, I issue our own manumission, my fellow leftists. We have shaken off the chains of perfection, we are free of the lash of faultlessness. We claim our right to consider our own opinions superior and worthy of dominance. Never again will we present the arguments of conservatives as if they merit equal treatment. We will scorn their folly and expose their lies and their entertaining hypocrisies without apology. We will get off our knees and kick every fascist where it counts. In all seriousness, our lives, the lives of our loved ones, the life of the biosphere absolutely depend on it. We must crush out of ourselves and our kind the remains of these mind forged manacles and wipe their residue from every voice and their assumed existence from every ban. Friends, we have nothing to fear. We are free.
Disclaimer: I make no pretense of being a journalist. At best, if someone wanted to insult me, they might claim me as a columnist, an unskilled occupation of which I do not claim to be a part. I would never want anyone to assume that I pretend to be a real journalist, a reporter.
If Kamala Harris and Tim Walz win the election, especially if they win big I hope one of the results is that it vindicates a decision to bypass the legacy, hack, Republican-literally-fascist enabling corporate media, which I hope will be the beginning of the end of it. We need a media but it is not that media, what we need is real journalism which you can hardly find in the legacy media, starting with that Sulzberger run house of presstitution, the New York Times but including virtually all of the big media. I think I mentioned a month or so back listening to a journalist from a small Latino newspaper who said the NYT today was a gaming company that had something that passed as a news operation still going. For example, there's today's third worst person in the world, according to Keith Olbermann, the NYTwit Jeremy Peters as aided by MSNBC's Katy Tur.
There is a massive study waiting to happen on the topic of the complicity of America's freest press in the history of the "free press" in the age of impunity for lying, rejecting community service, rejecting any kind of even the pathetic excuse for "fairness" that was the Fairness Doctrine. Not only its complicity of such a media in the age of free speech absolutism but what I think is a near certainty that such a media serve the enemies of everything from electoral government to even abolishing the identity of the truth as opposed to lies of the most transparent kind. Such a media, such a "press" is the opposite to what the dolts who drafted the dangerously inspecific First Amendment imagined would be such a media left entirely to its own devices, as exempted from even the libel and slander penalties that kept such media from doing its worst even in its entirely inglorious past and into its infamous present.
I fucking hate NPR. I wish I'd never sent it a penny back when I still stupidly supported it. I have learned not to trust alleged "not for profit" media because they were among the first and worst sell outs, bought out by Koch money, the fascist Heritage Association and which pushed shit like Politico and The Hill even before I'd read them and realized they were even worse in full than before. Just like I used to watch Brian Lamb on C-Span pushing the worst of the worst, helping make Matt Druge's career, pushing Judicial Watch and countless other sewage.
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