I have been accused time and time again by my more conservative correspondents of my so-called one-sided support of the Liberal-Democratic thought machine (Oh, how I wish we were so well organized to have developed a thought machine as highly evolved as Faux News). So I began to introduce any mild criticism of the current right-wing and Republican leadership with quotes from one or another of their own who find their antics somewhat reprehensible.
Back in December, even before the current Republican nomination circus yet had fallen from the mildly humorous to the absolutely reprehensible, I came across this quote from former Reagan advisor Bruce Bartlett:
"Basically we're still stuck in the situation we were three years ago and we haven't made any progress at all except that our problems are much worse because of political reasons, because we now have a crazy party in charge of one of the Houses of our Congress and they won't allow anything to happen because it's in their vested interest to make things worse," Bartlett explained in his typically exasperated way. "Plus they have a theory that is completely nuts…. I'm very depressed. [...] The most we can hope for is that a complete crazy person like Newt Gingrich gets the Republican nomination, the Republicans lose so badly that they lose control of the House and don't get control of the Senate and then maybe in a year we can finally talk about doing something rational. [...]"
Under the current rules of debate laid down by Faux News and my conservative correspondents I wonder if it is it unfair and one sided to quote a Republican leader who criticizes his party in language no Democrat elected official could or would dare use? Do I also have to find a Democrat critical of his own Party to be fair? Or, locate a Republican who blindly loves his Party? Would the possibility that the Democrat I chose could be more radical than the main-stream Democratic Party be considered fair to fairly balance this opinion? Is fairness really what is wanted here? Remember, the Faux News, network logo "Fair and Balanced" is not just a marketing slogan asserting that their news reporting meets that standard, but also implies the claim that all other news networks are both unfair and unbalanced. That means for example, if they (Faux) for some reason have an objection to the assertion that the world is round, they could consider it to be fair and balanced for them to maintain that in fact the world is flat.
Or as David Frum, another conservative critic of the depths to which his chosen party has fallen, put it.
"The business model of the conservative media is built on two elements: provoking the audience into a fever of indignation (to keep them watching) and fomenting mistrust of all other information sources (so that they never change the channel). As a commercial proposition, this model has worked brilliantly in the Obama era. As journalism, not so much."
"But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics."
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Today's Quotes from Trenz Pruca:
1.
"Why would anyone be morally bound or wish to be morally bound to a civil society that does not share the goal that it’s citizens deserve a fair distribution of wealth, income and power? If the civil society is not dedicated to that end what else could it possibly be dedicated to? What is freedom, to those without wealth, income or power?"
2.
"Historically, Populism like most mass movements scours up both the worst and the best in a society as it scrapes across its depths. It is prompted by a deep mistrust of a community's most powerful individuals and institutions who, its adherents believe, have misused and mishandled the trust they had been granted, violated the social contract if you will. As the indefatigable realist Machiavelli pointed out; on the broad areas of public policy the general populace is almost always more reliable than the elite."
See also:
Papa Joe's Tales and Fables.
This and that...