The media slips an awful lot past the public with the word “context.” They frequently claim they don’t carry stories like this because the “context” doesn’t support making it worthy of mention. . . .
1. We don’t have to patrol the left for violence because the left is entirely non-violent and law-abiding. This assumption is of course false on its face and absurd even in postulation.
2. We don’t have to patrol the left for violence because we have such moral certitude about the goodness of our ends that we are justified in using otherwise-immoral means, such as violence, to attain them.
Go read the whole thing, because Ace is awesome when he’s really pissed off. And it pisses me off, too.
Ten years ago, I did a news article for the Washington Times examining the dearth of coverage about the murder of Jesse Dirkhising, an Arkansas teenager who was raped and suffocated by two men. One of the two killers had just been convicted, and another was still on trial. Why had the murder of Matthew Shepard merited wall-to-wall coverage while the death of Dirkhising — an equally horrendous and senseless crime — got no national coverage at all? I called up the networks to ask, and one response was particularly memorable:
“We’ve been watching the trial and will continue to monitor it,” ABC News spokesman Todd Polkes said Wednesday. “Currently, we have no plans to report it in our national newscasts. It appears to be a local crime story that does not raise the kind of issues that would warrant our coverage.”
What kind of issues do “warrant coverage”? And why are some issues so transparently more equal than others? Who decides these things?
No one ever satisfactorily answered those questions, and here again we see how media bias involves preconceived ideas of what issues “warrant coverage.”
Look, just from the standpoint of sensationalistic “if-it-bleeds-it-leads” newsworthiness, isn’t “Brutish Man Attacks Pretty Girl” kind of a catchy story? You don’t have to politicize the story in order to tell the story, yet reporters seem so afraid of what the story’s political impact might be that they refuse to tell it.
Just in case you’re wondering when Jeff went sour on Shep, let’s go back to September 2005, when Shep’s melodramatic flair was viciously satirized here, hereandhere.
Shep brings to his coverage the kind of detached stoicism one usually finds on the front row of a Liz Minelli concert.
A Jewish supporter of FreedomWorks is confronted by a leftist protester who accuses him of “not healing the world” (tikkun olam):
(From Ben Howe at Red State.) This angry woman screaming “bad Jew” exemplifies the moralistic radical certainy of the Left. For all their sermons about “civility,” the Left never hesitates to unleash this kind of frenzied carnival of hate against their designated scapegoats, without concern for whether they thereby create a climate in which a union goon roughs up Tabitha Hale.
As Lenin said: “Who, whom?”
UPDATE: Tikkun olam is a rabbinical concept that might properly be translated as “for the public good,” but which in the modern era has been politicized by many on the Left, so that it is indistinguishable in their interpretation from “social justice.” Most famously, Michael Lerner — a 1960s anti-war radical who once led an SDS splinter group called the Seattle Liberation Front — named his magazine Tikkun.
UPDATE II: Having watched this video a few more times, I noticed the older woman in the background holding up this poster:
The AFL-CIO is “healing the world”? Really? Richard Trumka and his corrupt cronies are pursuing tikkun olam? And then look at the self-righteous indignation on the young woman’s face:
This is a woman utterly convinced that she is on the side of Good and Right, and that anyone on the other side must therefore be an agent of Evil and Wrong, which is why she does not hesitate to condemn the FreedomWorks supporter is a bad Jew. And the fact that she has worked herself up into this paroxysm of fury on behalf of the AFL-CIO . . . How do you even begin to talk sense to such a person?
AFL-CIO rent-a-mobsters, including members of the Communications Workers of America, descended on the D.C. offices of FreedomWorks today for a protest. Tabitha Hale had a video camera going when she got shoved by a CWA goon:
UPDATE III: Duane Lester: “Perhaps in lieu of compensation, Mr. Union Thug will just have to go through some counseling at the new civility institute in Arizona.”
UPDATE IV: Dan Riehl: “So much for civility, it appears it’s given way to assault and battery.”
Bryan Preston points out the obvious: “One of the absolute dumbest things anyone can do is take a swing at another person when that other person has a video camera on and recording. The momentary swing become permanent evidence of assault.”
CWA is obviously recruiting its goons from the shallow end of the IQ pool these days. I mean, hitting a girl? “There was a time when even union thugs would have left a young lady alone,” Da Tech Guy says.
Professor Glenn Reynolds: “[T]ake a look at the video and you’ll see the angry, yet impotent face of today’s labor movement.”
And so an obvious Narrative question presents itself: She must have been asking for this somehow, but … how? Perhaps she was invading this fine gentleman’s “personal space?” Or perhaps she somehow “manufactured” the confrontation to precipitate a little thuggery, thereby painting poor liberals in a bad light.
Willis has denied that the first of those Tweets had anything to do with this Freedomworks incident, and the second was his reaction to Wurtzel’s accusation that Willis was saying this was a “manufactured” incident.
OK, fine: If Willis says this was merely coincidental, I’m prepared to accept his word for it. Total coincidence — nothing whatsoever to do with the chatter that was all over Twitter. Willis just happened to have this sudden sense of foreboding about “manufactured conservative confrontations.”
UPDATE VIII: Let’s engage in a little hypothetical scenario, shall we? Suppose that a liberal activist had been assaulted on camera at a Tea Party event — on the streets of D.C., three blocks from the Capitol, in broad daylight. Do you suppose sucn an incident would have been mentioned by a mainstream news organization or two?
I ask this, because as of 8:25 p.m. ET, the only Google News results for the Tabitha-gets-thugged incident are from conservative outfits, including Powerline and the Daily Caller.
The Journolisters never report any story that portrays the Left in a bad light. But let a psychotic left-wing Zeitgeist cultist commit a mass murder, and watch the Journolisters rush to blame that on the Right. And even after the leftist leanings of the gunman are revealed, the Journolisters will refuse to acknowledge their error, nor will they admit that the error was caused by their habit of recycling Democrat propaganda and calling it “news.”
It is a key tenet of Democrat propaganda that the Right (and only the Right) is crammed full of hate-filled kooks who can be incited to violence by the “vitriolic” rhetoric of their spokesmen. In order to foster that perception, however, the Journolisters must be careful never to call attention to acts of violence (or expressions of hate) emanating from the Left.
So it is that these supposed arbiters of objectivity present a twisted picture of the world as distorted as the reflection in a funhouse mirror.
UPDATE IX: Little Miss Attila: “This is why we should try to have a second camera, so we can record it when the person with the first camara gets attacked.”
UPDATE X: Dave explains that this is the “New New Tone” — as opposed to the Old “New Tone,” which was what liberals demanded while they were falsely accusing the Tea Party, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh of inspiring mass murder. Then there was the Slightly Newer New Tone, which was when liberals accused conservatives of being “defensive” because conservatives kept pointing out that false accusations of inspiring mass murder were, in fact, false.
“I’m proud to be here with people who understand that it’s more than just sending an email to get you going. Every once and awhile you need to get out on the streets and get a little bloody when necessary,” Rep. Mike Capuano (D-Ma.) told a crowd in Boston on Tuesday rallying in solidarity for Wisconsin union members.
Head-busting union goons — like the SEIU thugs who recently roughed up a Tea Party supporter in Denver — are surely grateful to know they have Capuano’s enthusiastic support. Because of the decline of union membership, most young people today know little of the coercion, intimidation and outright terrorism by which Big Labor has always operated, and it still goes on to this day. As Karen Kerrigan noted in a 2002 article, “According to the National Institute of Labor Relations Research, there have been over 9,000 reported acts of union violence since 1975. These incidents have included intimidation, sexual and racial harassment, physical violence, vandalism and even death.”
Unions, most of whose members are public employees, gave Democrats some $400 million in the 2008 election cycle. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the biggest public employee union, gave Democrats $90 million in the 2010 cycle.
As Mike Hendrix at Cold Fury points out, this creates a “nice, tight, and very vicious little circle”: Taxpayers are forced to pay more to government employees, who are in turn forced to pay dues to the unions, which then give money to elect Democrats, who then give generous concessions to unions — and round and round we go!
“You want to go make seven, eight dollars an hour, go make seven, eight dollars an hour. You know, we fight for what we believe in here so we can make prevailing wage and have benefits.”
Implicit in this assertion is the belief that the only way anyone can ever receive higher wages is through the “collective bargaining” (or to say it more honestly, the organized intimidation) power of unions. That this belief system amounts to a license to commit extortion against employers, and an authorization of violence against uncooperative workers, is self-evident.
The labor-union mentality involves a vast galaxy of false and pernicious beliefs that require more time to explain and unravel than I’m willing to devote to the topic here. However, the net effect is to convince workers of their own lack of individual agency, so that they think their working lives have no value except what they can extort through “collective bargaining.” Where that mentality can eventually lead may be surmised from Da Tech Guy’s Examiner column:
The basic union argument was that Wisconsin was trying to bust unions. A former nonunion ironworker who now was in the union talked about how he found himself protected by the solidarity and the contracts of the union and made a strong case for his side.
On the other side a gentleman from the former Soviet Union equated the union side to the old communist apparatchiks of his youth where the benefits were actually shared by a few.
Once you decide that the ends justify the means, it’s only a matter of time before you find yourself pondering what Hayek meant to explain in “Why the Worst Get on Top.” This is why the pervasive corruption of labor unions (e.g., the Missouri local president who embezzled nearly $70,000 from an SEIU-affiliated union) should never surprise us. Do we really expect to find honest men in charge of an extortion racket?
If a group of public servants under the UCMJ were to pull the sort of rolling stunt currently seen in Wisconsin, with support in various other states, no one would hesitate to call it precisely what it is.
Private sector unions are one thing. Trumka is a genius, getting all of those people to give him money to maintain the Blagojevich hair (whined the bald blogger). But public sector workers are an ass of a different color; they are public servants, not public masters.
If public sector workers are looking for sympathy, they can find it in the dictionary between schist and syphilis, to tidy an old family saying. Take your haircut back to what the tax base can afford, and get back to work. If this suits you not, recall that you voluntarily work for the public, and can voluntarily go find yourself a better job based upon your merit. These teachers, for example, can take their precious butts out there and start a private school, no? Let the resulting stellar test scores among the students carry their righteous argument.
May fortune smile upon Scott Walker and his efforts.
Democrats went into a behind-closed-doors meeting Monday, refusing to return to the floor. Today, sources told The Indianapolis Star that Democrat lawmakers have left the state.
Daniels, a Republican, supported their right to deny Republicans a quorum to do business and the rights of labor unions to protest at the Statehouse.
“The activities of today are perfectly legitimate part of the process,” he said. “Even the smallest minority, and that’s what we’ve heard from in the last couple days, has every right to express the strength of its views and I salute those who did.”
Daniels took another step toward revealing himself as a Not Ready For Prime Time Player today when he told Indiana House Republicans to drop the Right-to-Work bill . . .
If you don’t support the right to work without interference from union goons, you’re not conservative:
Gov. Mitch Daniels signaled this afternoon that Republicans should drop the right-to-work bill that has brought the Indiana House to a standstill for two days and imperiled other measures.
Daniels told reporters this afternoon that he expects House Democrats will return to work if the bill dies. It would be unfortunate if other bills are caught up in the turmoil, he said.
This involves a few individuals out of the nearly 1,300 physicians at UW Health.
These UW Health physicians were acting on their own and without the knowledge or approval of UW Health. These charges are very serious and in response, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and University of Wisconsin Medical Foundation, the UW Health entities that employ the physicians, have immediately launched an investigation of the reported behavior.
The investigation will identify which UW Health physicians were involved and whether their behavior constituted violations of medical ethics or University of Wisconsin and UW Health policies and work rules.
Although this might seem an outrageous breach of professional ethics, it is actually entirely consistent with the new brand of “progressive” medical ethics currently taught to medical students. . . .
In 2002, the American College of Physicians proposed a charter in which the three guiding ethical principles for physicians would be: patient welfare, patient autonomy, and “social justice.” In 2007, the AMA ITME (American Medical Association Initiative to Transform Medical Education) reported on the importance of training medical students to be better advocates for “social justice,” and proposed changes in the medical school admissions criteria and curriculum to address this perceived inadequacy.
And let’s face it: Once doctors are taught that abortion is a “right,” any traditional concept of “medical ethics” becomes invalid. Whence did such value-judgments (e.g., that the “right” to abortion trumps the physician’s interest in preserving life, or that the “right” of protesting budget cuts justifies a bogus medical excuse) arrive in our institutions of higher learning? How did these ideas entrench themselves so deeply in academia? Continue reading ‘Wrist Slaps for Everyone’ →
