| Young Republicans |
| Pundit Gallery | Andrea Mitchell | Brit Hume | Chris Wallace | Chuck Todd | David Brooks | Gwen Ifill | Jim Lehrer | Katty Kay | Lizzie Grubman | Maria Quiban | Martine Dennis | Mishal Husain | Shepard Smith | Tavis Smiley | Tim Russert | Tom Brokaw | Tony Snow | Young Republicans | Zeinab Badawi | |
Nah, it isn't so much a matter of their positions (most of which I do disagree with, though that's beside the point), it's the character of many young conservatives that unnerves me.
Note that I'm not attempting to describe ALL young conservatives, but only to identify some things that bug me about many I've known - stress on the "I've known" part.
Comes down to this: many young conservatives tend to be wealthy and smug - they often seem to take perverse pride in their own heartlessness and their contempt for idealists and the poor. Many I've known have been quick to champion the successes of self-made entrepreneurs and to ridicule the failures of various "interest groups" to fend for themselves. ...All while living off of the largesse of their well-to-do families.
The poor and middle-class young conservatives I've known have tended to be hyper-aggressive cranks with an axe to grind against anyone they feel is "ripping them off" (i.e., borderline psychos and closet racists), or dimwitted followers of their parents' beliefs (i.e., Mormons and other faith zombies).
Finally, young conservatives are almost always guys.
Obviously, "rich kids, dutiful sheep and scary malcontents" do not fairly define young conservatives as a whole. But it seems to me that they are disproportionately represented and that they tend to control the terms of debate.
Let's cut the crap as to what Republican values really are. Republicans are club run by some of the wealthiest 1% whose interests are to maintain their "old money" wealth or for upper middle class people, to get richer. Their agenda is to get richer at all costs, profit at all costs. Nothing else matters, not the environment, not the people, not society, not culture, not civil rights, not the future, nothing. Everything they profess to believe in is contradicted by their actions. When Republican politicians talk, their audience is not the common man, they are talking to their constituents of upper middle class and upper crust wealthy contributors. The news media consists of upper middle class people who are trying to get richer. Calling the news media "liberal" is nothing more than a ploy by right-wing think-tanks to intimidate journalists to tow the conservative party line and to demonize progressive politics. There is a lot of news that does not get reported in the "mainstream" news media because that news would undermine the authority of the ruling classes. The religious conservatives claim to have a higher moral ground so they can make connections to the upper-class tiered Republicans. The Republicans use the religious conservatives as a tool to bring out the vote, but rarely do the Republicans actually follow through on their promises to the religious conservatives. Those who are poor who want to be Republicans are wannabees who want to identify themselves with wealth, power, and the upper crust of society. The real Republicans with power, the "old money" establishment Republicans who pull the strings, patronize the wannabees with a few crumbs but eventually betray them.
Seriously think about this. What person who works in a McJob (low wage, no benefits, no health care, no 401K, dead end, no fixed schedule) would support Republican rhetoric that would eliminate the minimun wage, cut social services, eliminate any corporate liability for worker safety, and just make their lives more difficult? Only poor people who have adopted Republican rhetoric as aspirational class values can delude themselves into thinking that they are Republicans and that the top Republican politicians are looking out for their (average citizens') interests.
Republican media pundits have successfully demonized "liberals" to such an extent that "liberals" are vilified in the news media as being "unpatriotic anti-American traitors who hate America and want to destroy America". In "the Midwest" of America especially, Republicans media pundits have associated "liberals" with communists, homosexuals, and traitors. If you actually look up the word "liberal" in the Dictionary, you'll see that the Republicans' definition of "liberal" is a lie: Dictionary definition of "liberal"
I'm all for "getting rich" and being as successful as you possibly can. But young Republicans don't believe in "hard work." They want to make their fortunes through finagling the "system" and breaking all the rules everyone else has to abide. Republicans "deregulated" the banking industry which led to the SNL-scandals. Republicans "deregulated" environmental regulations which allows their companies to pollute the environment today leaving the long term consequences of their pollution to future generations to clean up. Republicans "deregulated" the Wall Street regulations which lead to the dot-com-scam which ruined millions of Americans financially. The Republicans in these and many other instances changed the rules to make their highly unethical and criminal activities become "legal"; they get rich and everyone else gets screwed. Republican congressman speak against "socialized medicine" for the people, then they vote themselves huge government paid for medical services for themselves and huge subsidies for drug companies that have contributed to their election campaigns. An honest man can make an honest ROI - Return on Investment. Republicans want to make an exaggerated ROI; they will plunder companies' profits (instead of reinvesting profits into the companies to upgrade equipment and develop new products), they will pay themselves outrageous salaries/bonuses/expense accounts, they will take over the management of once profitable companies like parasites and run them into the ground then jump out with huge golden parachutes right before the companies go bankrupt. Republicans see themselves as predators in a Social Darwinist world. They are out to do whatever it takes to get richer. "Business is war" is their motto.
Republicans believe that might makes right, compromise is weakness, and that there is no such thing as "the truth." Republicans believe that compromising is what the weak do to survive. Republicans thereby divorce themselves from reality and create their own reality, regardless of the facts. Compromise is a fundamental component of the give-and-take of the democratic process. The Republican's do-it-my-way-only tactics, namecalling, fabrication of information, suppression of dissent, pushing politics as personalities over issues, and denial of accountability, are the antithesis of the approach that we need. The Republican's symbiosis with large corporations and wealthy individuals is not democratic; their way is fascism.
Greed is the center of their ethic. Republicans mask their greed with rhetoric that presumes to give them a higher moral ground. But in actions, Republicans contradict what they profess to believe in. When you get into an argument with a Republican, you can easily unhinge their arguments by using a few examples that point out their contractions. In every case I've seen where a Republican was confronted with the facts that destroyed their arguments, the Republican immediately stops defending their positions and starts attacking the other side personally and physically. You'll see Republicans react the same way in politics, the media, and in person. When you confront a Republican with facts that contradict their rhetoric, you unmask their prejudices and that makes them mad.
"But one of the great successes of the intellectual right, is that they have succeeded brilliantly during the last 20 years at pinning the intellectual label solely on liberals so that a lot of people think that to be an intellectual means that you are a liberal alone. And one of the reasons that I think that right-wing intellectuals are so dangerous is they've been so clever at doing this. They've been much more clever than liberal intellectuals have been.
They've made it look like liberals are the only-- are the, quote, elites. And-- but they're just, you know, people-- people who get huge salaries from business-financed, right-wing foundations. They're not the elites? Of course, they're the elites. I don't have-- I object to their ideas. I don't object to them. But the liberal intellectual community is really caught asleep at the switch by these people. And one of the points I make in THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON, which is why I think I'm going to get killed from both the right and the left is anti-rationalism in America is not the province of either the right or the left.
It's the province of both. For example, when you will talk to right-wing intellectuals about the Iraq war-- it doesn't matter that it hasn't worked out to them. They still think it was right. And the evidence of how it got started, how it got started on false pretenses and so on, it doesn't matter to them.
They make wishful thinking sound rational."
- Susan Jacoby, PBS Moyers Journal, 2/15/08
First you must differentiate the news medias. There are three kinds of news medias relative to each country. There is independent news media which is independent from corporate ownership. There is foreign news media which is less susceptible to control from domestic politics. And there is corporate news media which is owned by wealthy individuals and large corporations and are used by their owners to push their corporate agendas. The corporate news media defines the issues, frames the debates, and shills the agendas of the wealthy establishment and corporate cartels. The corporate news media is fomenting a society where the only people who are entitled to the benefits of the society's wealth are the owners of corporations. The corporate news media reduces civic discourse to the superficiality of personality politics. The corporate news media wants to "control the narrative", control the "mass culture zeitgeist", control the "political landscape", rewrite history, and control "popular opinion" and they do so by "framing the debate" thereby creating "false dichotomies."
The corporate news media does not believe in the concept "the truth." Believing in "the truth" and the concept of "the truth" are enlightened "Liberal" ideals which the corporate elite and their corporate lackeys woefully disdain. The corporate masters believe in wealth, authority and power above all else, facts notwithstanding. The corporate masters do not believe in the concepts of "the real world", "reality" and "facts." They believe their world consists of the people that matter to them, themselves and their friends they socialize with, and everybody else is peasant labor or surplus population. They believe that "the truth" is nothing more than popular opinion which they can control by controlling "the narrative".
The corporate masters' ultimate goal is to create a "corporate state" world just like they have in third world countries, just one big Plantation State or "Company Town". For them, they do not belive in the commonwealth or mankind. They want to live in the big luxury houses on the hills, safe behind gated communities, and everybody else to live in shanty towns downstream from the industrial waste plants. They will fight ruthlessly against anything that benefits the public like better education, cleaner environment, living wages, free speech, peace, unions, and open political discourse. The corporate masters will use the best marketing techniques to engineer false arguments to control and manipulate the public. They don't have to fool all the people all the time, just enough people to sway elections to their lackey "made men." The corporate masters use their mouthpeices, the corporate news media and politico pundits, to control the swing voters' perception of reality. They want the public to live in a perpetual state of "passive resignation" to accept whatever the corporate news media and politico pundits tell them to think.
Examine all the links below this commentary and quotes. The real news websites listed below tell you the news that the tabloid corporate-media refuses to report. Bookmark the links to the real news websites below and check them frequently. Tell your friends about the BBC, Air America Radio, PBS NOW show, and these other news websites because they tell you the real news, not the corporate-media think-tank paid-pundit spun-propaganda "faux news" the USA based news networks spew. Even though the BBC News has been neutered somewhat after the former heads of the BBC, Gavyn Davies and Greg Dyke, refused to apologize for telling the truth and were forced to resign, the BBC is still better than USA based corporate news. It is up to you to decide to find the truth about the world for yourself. I don't list the names of these websites so you can find out what they are as you search for the truth. USA based corporate-news-media-networks have been so increasingly deceptive and manipulative that the more educated people in this country and many people in the rest of the world think of USA based news networks as illegitimate and not credible. The amount of unsavory deceit, duplicity, complicity, and manipulation by USA based corporate-news-networks is abominable. As soon as you go on the internet to read how foreign journalists cover the same events, you immediately become aware of the fact that USA based news networks have a "unique" spin on the world (to put it mildly). The majority of Americans get their news from the network news services and they have been making choices based on the USA based news networks' duplicitous propaganda. Americans who live in "the Midwest" don't have access to alternative news sources and have been manipulated by the corporate-media to believe in lies that would shock Americans who live in the big cities. American "mainstream" news media is owned by a small group of wealthy individuals who use the news media to promote their corporate agendas. These wealthy individuals socialize with their peers who have the same backgrounds (same neighborhoods, colleges, fraternities, prep schools, private schools, etc.,) at their elite social institutions (rich white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men only clubs) and set the political agendas for the rest of society. In the business world these businessmen are at each others' throats, but in politics, they form cartels to work for their class' interests. Through their subsidized think-tanks, they funnel huge campaign contributions to the political parties to control the politicians. Through their media outlets, these wealthy individuals frame the national dialogue. The media cartel serves their masters. The TV news medias support only politicians who can raise the most money from the corporate-think-tanks who will in turn use that money to buy TV advertising. The TV news medias only cover politicians who can afford to buy lots of expensive TV advertising. The "mainstream" news medias shun all politicians who cannot buy lots of expensive advertising. The wealthy individuals control the journalists by employing them at their media outlets and by bribing them through their think-tanks; think-tanks bribe journalists with hundreds of thousands of dollars for private speaking engagements (some of these speaking engagements are actually junkets - expensive paid vacations where the journalists don't actually have to speak). Corporate-mainstream-network journalists who don't "play ball" and tow the party line get cut off from the trough, get demoted, or just fired and blackballed. For the corporate-mainstream-network journalists who do "play ball" with the corporate-think-tanks, there is a revolving door of employment between corporate-mainstream-network news outlets, think-tanks, kickback jobs as "image consultants" and "message consultants", and even official political-patronage "advisement" appointments in government. For the politicians that "play ball" with the corporate-think-tanks, there is a revolving door of employment between political offices (won in elections or gained via partisan appointments, political-patronage), think-tanks, and seats on board of directors for front/shell corporations that exist from government contracts. The issues that concern the publics' interests are shut out of the mainstream political dialogue. Some of these wealthy individuals not only have the interests of their corporations ahead of the publics' interests, they have the interests of foreign countries ahead of the publics' interests. This cabalistic society is like a mythical Chimera (mythical creature that had one body and many heads) for those dissenters who speak up against the cabal will be shouted down and smeared by surrogate paid-media-pundits superficially coming from many separate media channels but all saying the same think-tank-prescribed "talking points". The cabal's paid-pundits in the media never substantiate their claims, they just harass dissenters with ad hominem attacks and straw man arguments (see the logical fallacies links below). The political parties work to socialize corporations' costs, risks, and cleanup while privatizing profits. The public subsidizes big business' research and development, pays for big business' liability, and pays for cleaning up the messes caused by big business' byproducts, pollution, and environmental degradation. Coporations use the media and politicians to shift the burden of economic risk from corporations and the government onto the backs of the average citizen. Partisan politics is a means in itself, a business that functions as a clearing house for corporate interests. Political party conventions are farces designed to patronize the ideologues, but the candidates themselves are oblivious to their own parties' "platforms" and are sometimes outright contemptuous of their hard core members. The corporate-mainstream-news-media is the mouthpiece of the corporations. The corporate-news-mainstream-media fools as many people (as necessary to "decide" elections) into believing that their anointed political parties' candidates have the publics' interests. The political parties hire pollsters and political consultants who can measure what the public cares about, and then semantically modify their pitch to manipulate the public into believing that the politicians are going to do what the people want when the politicians are going to do exactly the opposite. The most manipulated and lied to citizens live in the Midwest and "swing states" that "decide" elections; the media gives them different news from the rest of America.
The corporate-news-mainstream-media are liars, professional liars at that who are contemptuous to democracy, democratic ideals, and the publics' interests. The newscasters who've risen to the top got there by being the most backstabbing manipulative players who screwed over everyone else who competed against them. The people in the news business are quintessential kiss-up, kick-down sort of people. The only reason why they keep their jobs is their ability to lie, manipulate, and appear sincere when they are lying. Corporate-news-mainstream-media newsreaders wear poker faces and lie without any qualms, compunction, and penitence. Corporate-news-mainstream-media newsreaders are pretentious sanctimonious disingenuous people who put on airs of superiority and infallibility and are able to feign indignation, feign sincerity, and pretend to care. Foreign news sources and domestic independent USA news sources frequently use verifiable facts to contradict almost everything shilled by USA based news networks. USA based "mainstream" corporate-news have lost so much credibility that it has become a joke. In American news media, the punditocracy's pack journalism is the standard norm. Instead of giving the public real news, USA based "mainstream" corporate-news shills tabloid news that panders to the media "market bias" of the day. The media cartel tries to turn the public into passive consumers instead of active citizens. The media is full of partisan hacks/pundits, who push corporate mythology, push corporate talking points, frame the debates in terms the corporate politicos want, and shut out all political dissent from the national dialogue. The partisan hacks act as opinion molders by being surrogates for the political parties and lobbyists; the politicians themselves will remain "clean" from making attacks because the surrogate partisan hacks/pundits in the corporate media will do that dirty campaign work for them. Corporate politicos can never convince people to vote against their own economic self-interests, so instead they campaign to trick the people. Since corporate politicos can't offer logical rational arguments to people, they go for irrational illogical arguments. Corporate politicos poll the people to find out what are the most decisive "hot button"/wedge issues and then create vitriolic aggressive campaigns using false information to unfairly smear their opponents. The corporate news media goes along with the corporate politicos by shilling disinformation to the public, not refuting blatantly false disinformation, and shutting out all dissenting voices, all the while disingenuously pretending to be unbiased news. People in foreign countries look at Americans with dismay, like we've been brainwashed by corporate PR. Most Americans are totally oblivious to the geopolitical consequences of their actions because the corporate media doesn't want the public to know what geopolitics is. The American public is sheltered from the truth about the world that foreign people are aware of. Ignorance is bliss and the real news you'll read below is disturbing. I've met people who never read the news and they live perfectly happy, and I've met people who care about humanity and the truth and are frustrated and depressed; but the former are dupes while the latter are the wiser. You can go on believing the disinformation the USA based news networks shill and live in ignorance, or you can read these websites to start finding out the truth. The choice is yours.
Although tens of thousands of working people came to protest George Bush and his suspiciously-named "free trade" economic policies; they were invariably smeared by the corporate media as "Leftists" or "radicals"; eliminating the possibility that they were simply concerned citizens participating in the democratic process. This is the familiar tactic of the media to marginalize ordinary people whose interests don't correspond to those of the ruling elite.
"The trouble is that once you see it, you can't unsee it. And once you've seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There is no innocence. Either way, you're accountable."
- Arundhati Roy
"Throughout the annals of political science -- or at least the annals of Internet history -- there's been an unwritten law: Elections are won by whomever devises the best way to cheat."
- Lou Cabron
"The press isn't quite as biased and liberal. They're actually conservative sometimes"
- William Kristol, Fox News neocon pundit, CNN's "Reliable Sources", 2000
"I admit it, The whole idea of the 'liberal media' was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures."
- William Kristol, Fox News neocon pundit, The New Yorker, 5/22/95
"Every great cause evolves into a movement, then into a business, and then it degenerates into a racket."
- Eric Hoffer, (I've seen many different arrangements of this quote)
"A defining attribute of a government is that it has a monopoly on the legitimate exercise of violence."
- George Will, right-wing columnist, "Realistic words would be welcome on Iraq", 3/3/06
"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."
- Maj. General Smedly Butler
"Somehow, the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtueless, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country. Somehow, this is tolerated. Somehow, nobody is accountable for this."
-Kevin Tillman, former Army Ranger who served in Iraq and Afghanistan with his older brother, the late Pat Tillman
"Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich."
- Sir Peter Alexander Ustinov
"The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. Instead of altering their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views... which can be very uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering."
- Doctor Who, fictional character, "Face of Evil"
"These are globetrotting sorts who are world citizens, and see the USA as merely a state within the world collective. Don't let those ... accents and folksy mannerisms fool you, they do not have an allegiance to this country; they live in the BIG picture, and are not fettered by borders, boundaries or oceanic barriers."
- anonymous web poster
"A conservative is one who admires radicals centuries after they're dead."
- Leo Rosten, Leo Rosten's Treasury of Jewish Quotations
"The fact is, there is no other way to strip a population of it's liberties than to make them fear living without a certain level of protection. Anyone calling us Truth seekers crack pots, or tin foil hats are either too lazy to research, look and listen to what is plainly presented in front of them, or two, are so caught up in the fake reality we are pushed to believe that anything outside of that is just too uncomfortable for them. Reality is always darker than fiction. You also have to understand, we aren't dealing with groups of people like you or myself. We are dealing with people who think and feel differently than we do. The powerful elite don't look at the rest of us the same way we view eachother. We aren't equals to them. We don't all deserve the same liberties or benefits of life. To them, we are pawns in their game for further growth of their power and wealth. Too many people in this country have their Eyes Wide Shut."
- Jason Appleton
"You got a lotta nerve / To say you are my friend / When I was down / You just stood there grinning /
You got a lotta nerve / To say you got a helping hand to lend / You just want to be on / The side that's winning"
- Bob Dylan: Positively 4th Street
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything."
- Communist Tyrant Josef Stalin
"Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."
- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials
"Mankind cannot take too much reality."
- TS Eliot
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
- Voltaire, French author, humanist, rationalist, & satirist (1694 - 1778)
"Once you accept another person's authority, you become a different person. You are concerned with how well you follow out your orders, rather than whether it is right or wrong."
- Dr. Thomas Blass
"News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress. Everything else is publicity."
- Lord Northcliffe
"There is no good and evil; there is only power and those too weak to seek it."
- JK Rowling, "Harry Potter", character Quirrell
"Man seizes, abandons, but then commits again the errors that flatter him."
- Antoine Lavoisier
"Propaganda, is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state."
- Noam Chomsky, Media Control, read everything you can by this author
"People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both."
- Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"In dictatorships we are more fortunate than you in the West in one respect. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and nothing of what we watch on television, because we know it's propaganda and lies. Unlike you in the West. We've learned to look behind the propaganda and to read between the lines, and unlike you, we know that the real truth is always subversive."
- dissident Czech novelist Zdener Urbanek
"Politics is about getting outside of yourself and your own problems for a little while and fully immersing yourself in the lies and deceit of others."
- Stephen Elliott, "Happy Baby"
"You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month."
- CIA operative discussing with Philip Graham, editor Washington Post, on the availability and prices of journalists willing to peddle CIA propaganda and cover stories. "Katherine The Great," by Deborah Davis (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1991)
"What a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence is an index into his desires -- desires of which he himself is often unconscious. If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way."
- Bertrand Russell
"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."
- Sinclair Lewis
"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers"
- Thomas Pynchon said (in Gravity's Rainbow)
"I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crises. The great point is to bring them the real facts."
- Abraham Lincoln, 16th president of US (1809 - 1865)
Pundit Gallery |
Andrea Mitchell |
Brit Hume |
Chris Wallace |
Chuck Todd |
David Brooks |
Katty Kay |
Lizzie Grubman |
Maria Quiban |
Martine Dennis |
Mishal Husain |
Shepard Smith |
Tavis Smiley |
Tim Russert |
Tony Snow |
Young Republicans |
Zeinab Badawi |
