The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

How to Deal With Biased Media Liars (and Other Such Worthless Scalawags)

Posted on | October 3, 2012 | 33 Comments

“My God, Scarlett O’Hara! When I start out to cut somebody up, you don’t think I’d be satisfied with scratching him with the blunt side of my knife, do you? No, by God, I cut him to ribbons.”
— Tony Calvert, in Gone With the Wind

Well, that’s merely an analogy — a colorful literary allusion — and my concern for the First Amendment requires that I condemn anyone who might contemplate dealing with even the most dishonestly biased journalist in the manner by which hot-tempered young Calvert dispatched his villainous hellbound foe.

No, not even Chris Matthews.

“When I start out to cut somebody up,” therefore, I’m limited to such damage as can be done by words, but I’m pretty handy with a rhetorical knife. With that in mind — and thinking what might possibly pain the conscience of even the most shameless liberal hack — please read my latest column at The American Spectator.

And be sure to read it all the way to the end.

Category: American Spectator, Barack Obama, Debates, Election 2012, Media Bias, Mitt Romney

Comments

33 Responses to “How to Deal With Biased Media Liars (and Other Such Worthless Scalawags)”

  1. JeffS
    October 3rd, 2012 @ 9:46 am

    “Whatever Happened to Truth?” is the modern version of “What is Truth?”

  2. Quid Est Veritas? | hogewash
    October 3rd, 2012 @ 9:55 am

    […] Stacy McCain documents how Truth seems to have slipped away from the Main Stream Media. (H/T, TOM) And if this election were only about the fates of a couple of politicians, the disgrace of the […]

  3. WJJ Hoge
    October 3rd, 2012 @ 9:56 am

    Quid est veritas?

  4. Anamika
    October 3rd, 2012 @ 10:11 am

    What happened to your other election crusade item, that about Obama’s fundraising figures and his unsustainable campaign burn rate?

    Going by what you were writing for months on the topic, since its just about a month to go now till the E-day, Romney must be burying Obama with all that money he was hoarding, right? NOT! http://hotair.com/headlines/archives/2012/10/03/obama-is-outspending-romney-on-tv-ads/

  5. Anamika
    October 3rd, 2012 @ 10:22 am

    Maybe this explains RSM’s dilemma on why Obama the “miserable failure of a
    President” is doing so well against his opponent in the polls?

    All told, 49 percent see the Democratic Party favorably, 42 percent unfavorably — somewhat more positive than negative, but a far cry from its recent highs. The GOP, whose allegiance has waned in the past decade, gets a negative score of 39-53 percent. And just 32 percent see the Tea Party favorably, 9 points off its peak in spring 2010.

    But then its just another one of those damned biased polls!

  6. JeffS
    October 3rd, 2012 @ 10:52 am

    Seeing Anamika spinning for Obama, and trying to demoralize conservative voters, confirms that “Whatever Happened to Truth?” is indeed the question of a modern Pilate.

  7. Anamika
    October 3rd, 2012 @ 11:03 am

    “What is Truth?” is not an original question indeed. Someone with more authority than McCain (the authority to crucify) asked that long ago. 😉

    Is the question, “What is truth?” along the same order as “What is a view?”

    The idea of a dominant (relative) “truth” kind of makes me chuckle.

    One thing this blog commenters has helped me to see is that a “view” is not “truth”. Not by a long shot.

    And it doesn’t matter one bit whether it’s a view shared only by me, or if it’s shared by 90% of the group.

    It’s still just a well conditioned, strongly justified habitual way of viewing the world. And it’s held in place until some uncooperative little ______ triggers another, less dominant view — which for that moment also seems like the honest to god ‘truth’. 🙂

  8. Christy Waters
    October 3rd, 2012 @ 11:58 am

    I love the word “scalawag”. It’s right up there with the word “scofflaw”. A lot of those in the media, too.

  9. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    October 3rd, 2012 @ 12:06 pm

    I love shennanagins too.

  10. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    October 3rd, 2012 @ 12:06 pm

    Of all the Barack Obama video out there, this is probably the most significant clip to a majority of Americans…

    We need to remind voters of this. Mitt Romney needs to do that tonight.

  11. rosalie
    October 3rd, 2012 @ 12:18 pm

    Anamika, If you’re not a Socialist or Communist, please give me one good reason that you think O is good for our country.

  12. JeffS
    October 3rd, 2012 @ 1:05 pm

    And, of course, Anamika fails to see that I attributed the original question to Pilate, and not McCain. Stacy merely updated the original. Tut tut, such poor reading comprehension.

    Which merely reinforces his point — with which I agree — that worthless scalawags (a/k/a “shameless liberal hacks”) like Anamika are worth the time and trouble to (metaphorically speaking) cut to ribbons with a knife.

    Especially since she clearly supports crucifixion as a form of capital punishment, which certainly fits under the heading of “cruel and unusual punishment”. Certainly she admires a man who lead the occupation of Palestine for an empire, and ordered many people crucified — Pontius Pilate.

  13. Anamika
    October 3rd, 2012 @ 1:10 pm

    I chat with myself a lot but I don’t always like my answers…

    Truth is inexplicable, for once you try to put it in words it can no longer be truth. That is why when Pilate, at his interrogation of Jesus, asked Jesus…’What is Truth?”….Jesus was silent.

  14. Anamika
    October 3rd, 2012 @ 1:19 pm

    […]

  15. Anamika
    October 3rd, 2012 @ 1:38 pm

    Off the subject a little. But what do you think really happened to Jesus when they were condemning him, was the crowd really yelling crucify him, crucify him, or is that made up?

    There’s really no way to know, but the discrepencies between even the canonical Gospels point toward more than a little fictionalization.

    I always wondered why the Gospels paint Pontius Pilate as a good guy who did not want to crucify Jesus, and blamed it all on the Jews. Marketing, I guess. Saul of Tarsus, aka “Saint Paul,” knew where the growth of the religion he’d concocted had to be — among the Hellenistic cultures of a region militarily, politically, and economically dominated by recently hatched imperial Rome, not among to relatively poor folks of old Judea, who by and large would never buy into the now-dead Jesus as the risen Messiah. Part of his marketing strategy was to blame the skeptical Jews for Jesus’ execution and attempt to exonerate Pilate — he tried to found a religion that was Roman friendly at the expense of his own people, the Jews at the eastern end of the empire.

    Pilate my intuition tells me was a cruel ruler, and was not as the Gospels painted it. Non-biblical history agrees with that assessment — his demeanor was what landed him in the relatively undesirable post of governor of impoverished Palestine and it stubbornly ethnocentric populace!

    And if I remember correctly, the Muslims have a belief in a Gospel of Barrabas, or something like that, and they have a totally different take on the Crucifixion. My knowledge of the Muslim take on the death of Jesus is limited to their viewing the resurrection as a mere fraud and Jesus as a great (but entirely human) prophet rather than the prophesized messiah or a unique incarnation of “God.” Though the Qur’an does endorse the idea of the virgin birth curiously enough.

  16. rosalie
    October 3rd, 2012 @ 1:40 pm

    Anamika, You have not answered my question.

  17. JeffS
    October 3rd, 2012 @ 1:51 pm

    Don’t forget “gonef” and “chutzpah”. Both of which apply to the shameless liberal hacks Stacy refers to.

  18. Anamika
    October 3rd, 2012 @ 1:52 pm

    Contrast Jesus’ reaction to the prospect of being crucified. He didn’t waste time railing against Pontius Pilate or the Roman emperor at the time.

    He didn’t rail against the High Priest and those who framed him for crimes he never committed.

    He knew, apparently, that this was the way things were going to be played out and accepted them fully.

  19. crosspatch
    October 3rd, 2012 @ 2:00 pm

    I haven’t read the linked article yet but one way I like to deal with them is to call out the actual journalist who wrote the article by name and not just the publication in which it appeared. Rather than say “AP says” or “NYT says” or WaPo says”, get the actual name of the journalist on the byline if one is available. If the byline is not published where you see the article, do a web search for the article and it is likely printed someplace where there IS a byline. Call out the person BY NAME when criticizing the article. This makes these things show up when a google search is done on that journalist.

  20. JeffS
    October 3rd, 2012 @ 2:06 pm

    Nor will she. This is her version of concern trolling, and wasting Stacy’s bandwidth. So I would cease engaging her baiting and obfuscation.

  21. rosalie
    October 3rd, 2012 @ 2:18 pm

    Now I know why she’s attracted to someone like O.

  22. Bob Belvedere
    October 3rd, 2012 @ 2:25 pm

    Did Mohammed move a mountain
    Or was that just PR?

  23. Bob Belvedere
    October 3rd, 2012 @ 2:29 pm

    If the Leftist Media apparatchiks had souls, it would be worthwhile to ask them: Quo Vadis?

    Of course, they don’t so they would not comprehend.

  24. Bob Belvedere
    October 3rd, 2012 @ 2:31 pm

    Yiddish has done nothing but bring joy to those of us who love words.

  25. crosspatch
    October 3rd, 2012 @ 2:42 pm

    The things that make you go “hmmmmm”.

    Murders in Chicago to shut people up who knew about Obama’s activities there?

    http://hillbuzz.org/time-to-tell-everyone-you-know-about-jeremiah-wrights-down-low-club-barackobama-presobama-26407

  26. Anamika
    October 3rd, 2012 @ 2:46 pm

    I don’t care what anybody says, ovaposting is a real art, and one which I, for one, am coming to truly appreciate more and more. Sometimes quantity IS quality.

    I’m not sure whether it was Lenin or Stalin who said, “Quantity has a quality, all its own.”

    Probably Stalin. He was into diminishing numbers, had a thingy about rank and file. [Official numbers (including famine) during his regime and purges, are estimated to be between 3 and 60 million (wiki) And we all know numbers never lie.]

    It could even have been Marx or Engels, who knows?

    But as Shakespeare said, “The more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite.” I believe he was referring specifically to posting. And he was totally right, of course.

    To paraphrase the Hip Gan himself, “My messages are my message.”

    All of them.

  27. Adjoran
    October 3rd, 2012 @ 2:55 pm

    I have yet to see the first rational thought out of you and yet you are tolerated.

  28. Anamika
    October 3rd, 2012 @ 3:07 pm

    O ye of little faith!

    Don’t ye know that faith can move mountains?

    In the case of the literal, faith that a bulldozer, (given time money fuel a good driver and plenty of patience) can move mountains.

    In the case of the metaphorical for example take my good friend and fellow prophet Mohammed.

  29. Anamika
    October 3rd, 2012 @ 3:10 pm

    You can look into the eyes of lots of so-called ‘asleep” people and see varying degrees of awareness. In some people the eyes are dead, fixed and dilated, not much movement there. In others you see keen intelligence and an active awareness. So I’d say there are infinite gradations on both sides of asleep and awake. The ‘door’ of enlightenment is just drawing a distinction at a particular gradation and that will differ from one realizer to the next as to where exactly that line is.

    I prefer to lower the bar pretty far down as to where I call that distinction, mostly so the bar is closer to where I live 🙂 If Mohammed can’t get to the mountain, redefine the mountain!

  30. Anamika
    October 3rd, 2012 @ 3:19 pm

    We all mirror our environments, and particularly those we are most closely entangled with — at least that’s what I keep reading and also experience first hand. Smile, and the world smiles with you, etc.

    That’s why they say it’s best to have no entanglements nor attachments if at all possible — just move Mohammed to the mountain and concentrate on alleviating suffering, if one can find no joy in their life otherwise.

  31. WJJ Hoge
    October 3rd, 2012 @ 3:21 pm

    Or perhaps “putz.”

  32. JeffS
    October 3rd, 2012 @ 3:52 pm

    Anamika does provide an interesting contrast from the typical leftie troll: there’s no sneering condescension when she posts. Only condescension.

  33. goddessoftheclassroom
    October 3rd, 2012 @ 7:18 pm

    Excuse me, but it was Tony Fontaine, brother of Alex and Joe, the latter of whom died in the war.. The Calverts were Cathleen and Cade plus several half-siblings after their father married the Yankee governess.