The propaganda mill is working overtime

Image credit here

Time Magazine has announced its Person of the Year, actually several Persons of the Year, including “journalist” Jamal Khashoggi who was murdered in Turkey last October.

Who was Jamal Khashoggi? Well, he was not a journalist. He was not a U.S. citizen. He was not even a Green Card holder. Khashoggi was a Saudi national and a political operative for the Muslim Brotherwood. From Daniel Greenfield at FrontPage:

The Khashoggi case demands context.

Before the media and the politicians who listen to it drag the United States into a conflict with Saudi Arabia over a Muslim Brotherhood activist based on the word of an enemy country still holding Americans hostage, we deserve the context.

And we deserve the truth.

The media wants the Saudis to answer questions about Jamal Khashoggi. But maybe the media should be forced to answer why the Washington Post was working with a Muslim Brotherhood propagandist?

And from LiberalForum:

Since Khashoggi's October 2 murder at the Saudi Arabian consulate in Turkey, media across the United States has claimed he was a U.S. green card holder. As a result, reporters and editors urged the White House to change long standing policies and partnerships with the Kingdom. 

But according to a report in Business Insider, Khashoggi wasn't actually a green card holder and simply visited the U.S. on a visa.

Mohamad Soltan, an Egyptian-American activist who sees Khashoggi regularly in Washington, told Reuters that Khashoggi was in the United States on an O-visa. . . .

The media is bestowing on Khashoggi increased visibility and now, “credibility” as a martyr for journalism, honored by Time magazine in the company of other journalists who risked their lives to report the news. As I see it, Time is cynically using those other journalists to provide cover for Khashoggi as a journalist. So now the media can continue to use him as a cudgel to whack away at President Trump’s Middle East policies as part of their anti-Trump agenda.

Alexander Downer at the Financial Review published an excellent summary of the story that the media won’t report, click here. The mainstream media’s dishonesty and bias is on full display 24/7, but it’s not always this blatant. Or self-serving.

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Walls

Amidst all the pontificating about "The Wall" being "immoral" and useless, this one is making the rounds:

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Tea Party and MAGA vs Uniparty

Image via Conservative Treehouse

Sundance has must-read history lesson starting with the Tea Party movement in 2009, its metamorphosis into the MAGA movement, and why the GOP continues to break its promises and obstruct President Trump’s initiatives. A few extracts from Sundance’s history lesson at Conservative Treehouse:

An interesting pattern of seemingly disconnected political stories is beginning to show signs of a common continuity.  In the bigger of the big pictures seven words continue to set the baseline: “There are trillions of dollars at stake”.

When the common sense Tea Party movement formed in 2009 and 2010 it contained a monumentally frustrated grassroots electorate, and the scale of the movement caught the professional republican party off-guard. When Donald Trump ran for the office of the presidency he essentially did the same thing; he disrupted the apparatus of the professional republican party.

The difference between those two examples is one was from the bottom up, and the second was from the top down.  However, the commonality in the two forces resulted in the 2016 victory.

. . .

A few years pass and the issues that spurred the Tea Party movement remained unresolved.  In 2015 Donald Trump taps in to that exact same Tea Party frustration toward the control authority within one-half of the DC UniParty; again, the professional republican apparatus was disrupted.  The movement re-branded and now the MAGA movement wins the presidency.

So it should not come as a surprise to see an eerily similar response from within the GOP toward the new threat; the Trump presidency.  After all, there are two constants in an ever changing universe: (1) “NeverTrump” didn’t go away; and (2) the Bush-clan, or GOP old guard, will never accept losing power.

The professional republicans and the professional democrats, ie. “the uniparty”, have a common enemy in President Trump.  The vulgarian leader of the deplorable coalition never asked for permission; never paid the indulgency fees; never attended the necessary cloistered club meetings paying homage; and never offered the indulgent team of political elites terms for his takeover.

Thus Donald Trump, just like the Tea Party, would never be accepted.

. . .

There are no MAGA lobbying groups in Washington DC advocating for policies that benefit economic nationalism.  On this objective President Donald Trump stands alone.

We don’t need a third party in Washington DC, we actually need a second one.

I no longer think of the GOP as the “party of Stupid.” I think of the GOP instead as the “Party of Bought” -- that would be the (R) half of the “Uniparty.”

Read the whole thing here.

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Remembering Pearl Harbor

"A date which will live in infamy"

Today we remember those who were caught by surprise when the Japanese attacked the naval base at Pearl Harbor. 2,403 Americans died in the attack. Above is footage of our flag flying over the Arizona memorial, taken by Cleveland Tea Party roving photographer Pat J Dooley.

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Presidents and PRESIDENTS

Americans witnessed Donald J. Trump’s transition from private citizen to candidate for the highest office in the land. DC Whispers ran this at their blog:

So much of what the Establishment Media says about the Trump presidency is a lie. As an incredibly successful private citizen Donald Trump swapped a life of luxury for a life of service and in doing so some estimate he’s lost a billion dollars or more in personal wealth to do so. Not since the days of the Founding Fathers has a president sacrificed so much for the betterment of so many. It is a stunning contrast to the Obamas who had almost no private life experience but instead have been feeding from the public monies trough since they were attending college on the people’s’ dime. There are givers and there are takers. In this case it’s very clear who is who…

The short blurb with image is here.

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Cleveland: a not-so-safe city

Adam McCann, a Financial Writer at a blog I never heard of, Wallet Hub, reports on the safest cities in the United States.

To determine where Americans can feel most secure — in more than one sense — WalletHub compared more than 180 cities across 39 key indicators of safety. Our data set ranges from assaults per capita to unemployment rate to road quality. Read on for our findings, a detailed description of our methodology and a Q&A with safety experts for additional insight.

In the overall rating, Cleveland is #169. Ugh. Full report and listings are here.

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Why Mr. Instapundit cancelled his Twitter account

I’ve posted earlier links on this subject here. Glenn Reynolds’s (Mr. Instapundit) USA column today expands on why he cancelled his Twitter account. His opener:

I deactivated my Twitter account about a week ago. I was partly acting on impulse, because the social media site had just, for no obvious reason, “permanently banned” someone I follow, something that seems to be happening more and more. 

But I was also acting on my growing belief that Twitter is, well, horrible.

All social media have their issues. The “walled garden” character they create is the antithesis of the traditional Internet philosophy of openness. They are actually consciously designed to be addictive to their users — one company that consults on such issues is actually called Dopamine Labs — and they tend to soak up a huge amount of time in largely profitless strivings for likes and shares. They promote bad feelings and bad behavior: I saw a cartoon listing social media by deadly sins, with Facebook promoting envy, Instagram promoting pride, Twitter promoting wrath, Tinder promoting lust and so on. It seemed about right.

But as someone who spends a lot of time on the internet and whose social media experience goes all the way back to the original Orkut and Friendster, I think that Twitter is the worst.  

In fact, if you set out to design a platform that would poison America’s discourse and its politics, you’d be hard pressed to come up with something more destructive than Twitter. Twitter has the flaws of the old Usenet newsgroups, but on a much bigger scale.

The full column is here.

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