Sometimes They Lie

After I had written a series of articles called “How News Reporting Really Works.” I’m a systems thinker. The idea of the series was to explain, systemically, how news reporters often get their stories and even their facts wrong. As a result, I was accused of giving the news media too much credit for honesty.
Actually, I wasn’t. I’m quite aware that some reporters deliberately slant the news to make lies look like facts and make speculation look like news. At the time, I had two reasons for not mentioning it: 1.) You already knew it, and 2.) It doesn’t take an entire article to say, “Sometimes they lie.”
A couple of days ago, I electronically copied the top half dozen web sites regarding, “Tea Party Movement.” For reasons of my own, I wanted to compare key words. Two of the top half dozen sites were Manhattan-based mainstream media (MSM) slanted against the Tea Partiers.
The one for Forbes magazine featured the porcine face and equally porcine opinions of Bruce Bartlett, and it was called “The Misinformed Tea Party Movement.” The kicker read, “For an antitax (sic) group, they don’t know much about taxes.” (For a journalist, he doesn’t know much about spelling or getting his facts straight.) Like King George III, Porcus Ignorantiam (We’ll call him PI for short) failed to realize that the Tea Parties are more about representation than about taxes.
PI based his conclusion on a survey he pulled on 57 of the several hundred people attending a Tea Party rally. Click here to see his survey questions. (If you’re an English grammar or composition teacher and have a weak heart, I caution you not to see how he phrased the questions. Likewise, if you’ve ever had experience conducting surveys, please consider the state of your health before clicking the link.)
Not even one of the survey questions is a reliable means of measuring people’s understanding of the issues of concern to them. Some of the questions are open to broad interpretation; thus, they’re open to widely disparate conclusions even by experts.
How’s this for a survey idea: Get 57 shameless propagandists who have been cloistered in the offices of magazines far from mainstream America. Place each one’s feet into a tub of wet cement until the cement hardens. Drop them into the ocean with a pen and pad for writing underwater. Then start asking them questions about their situation.
The questions may include the following: How much longer can a person hold his breath on land than he can in 100 feet of water? By percentage, what’s the carbon dioxide level in your brain? When sea salt comes into contact with the carbolic acid in your stomach, are the chances of your vomiting more, less, or about the same? How many swollen or ruptured capillaries are in your eyeballs at this moment?
If they’re not able to answer those questions, shall we conclude that they’re ignorant of their situation? May we thus conclude that they’re not really drowning?
Surely, Bruce Bartlett deserves the Ananias Award for Dishonest Reporting. (Oink! Oink!)
One of the sites (no longer in the top six, so I can’t locate it) said that the Tea Partiers are not populists. His creative line of reasoning read like a Monty Python script: Most populists identify themselves as mainstream conservatives (whatever that means). The article’s writer identifies Tea Partiers as to the right of (whatever that means) mainstream conservatives. Since they’re to the right of mainstream conservatives, they’re not populists.
Excuse me, but didn’t he say that most populists identify themselves as mainstream conservatives? Doesn’t that mean that some populists are not mainstream conservatives? Even if we excuse the writer’s ignorance of political theory and history, and even if we excuse his careless labeling, his entire argument hinged on a single point that he managed to get wrong.
Newsweek magazine went so far as to condemn Tea Partiers for their populism. Isn’t it amazing how MSM, with all their informational resources, can’t get their stories straight yet accuse millions of average Americans of being ignorant?

You may remember the CNN reporter who recently badgered Tea Party demonstrators in Chicago. She suggested that residents of Illinois shouldn’t complain about the so-called “Stimulus Package,” since a lot of the money went to Illinois. Check out the You Tube clip here.
Here’s a little experiment you may like to try—on second thought, you’d better not. Steal her purse, hop a flight to her home state, and max out all her credit cards. Then ask her how wonderful she feels about the money being spent in her home state. She deserves the Cujo Award for Most Obnoxious Bitch.
Many years ago, as I walked along an abandoned causeway in Sparrow Swamp, I suddenly found myself surrounded by hundreds of rattlesnakes. I had to calmly and carefully make my way about 100 yards along the causeway until I reached safer ground. I had to remind myself that they were probably more afraid of me than I was of them.
Tea Partiers, you have my sympathy. When you find yourself besieged by MSM reporters, stay calm and be careful. They’re probably more scared of you than you are of them. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be making those strange noises at you. You’re not doing what you’re doing to convince MSM; you’re doing it for the people reading their rags and watching MSM’s antics on television. You're doing it for all of us.

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Freedom from Fear

I don't pretend or presume that the Tea Partiers face the same level of difficulties that Daw Aung San Suu Kyi faces in her valiant struggle to bring representative government to her people in Burma. The Tea Partiers are struggling to restore the measure of representative government that Americans have lost as a result of apathy and folly.
Nonetheless, Aung San's view of the situation in Burma (the name by which she calls her country) can provide us with insights and inspiration into our struggles to regain lost freedoms.

The ruling junta in Burma, like the kakistocracy in America, is a corrupt regime. Aung San's religion (Buddhism) teaches that corruption has one or more of four sources: greed, malice, ignorance, and fear. The most pernicious of these is fear because it often gives rise to the other three sources. (I would add to that observation the notion that corruption arising from any source gives rise to fear.) Aung San observes, “With so close a relationship between fear and corruption, it is little wonder that in any society where fear is rife, corruption in all forms becomes entrenched.”
A lesson we can draw from this is that the ruling junta fears the people as much, if not more, than the people fear them. They protect themselves by instilling fear in the people. The people are encouraged to fear not only the regime but other ethnic groups in their country.
Aung San cites the Greek myth of the man who sowed dragon's teeth, each of which sprang up as warriors. The warriors were defeated by tricking them into turning against one another. Similarly, corrupt rulers keep the people down by tricking them into turning against one another.
We see that in America as well. Native-born Americans are turned against new Americans, and the distinction between immigrants and illegal aliens is deliberately blurred. Non-Muslims are taught that Muslims are supporters of terrorism if not terrorists themselves. Government agents are taught that air travelers are to be presumed guilty until proven innocent, throwing the constitutional guarantees against “unreasonable search and seizure” out the window. The list is almost endless. If we're not careful, our suspicion of Wall Street bankers may become corrupted into enmity between the middle class and the rich.
“Loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity,” she says, are, “'divine states of mind' which help to alleviate suffering and to spread happiness among all beings. The greatest obstacle to these noble emotions is...the rigid mental state that comes of a prolonged and unwavering concentration on narrow self interest. Hatred, anger, or ill will that arises from wrongs suffered, from misunderstanding, or from fear or envy may yet be appeased if there is sufficient generosity of spirit to permit forbearance, forgiveness, and reconciliation.” Aung San also urges that we “concede that the other party has an equal claim to justice, sympathy, and consideration.”
Thus far, this article has focused on different religious, political, or ethnic groups that have been divided against one another. What about policemen and military personnel who are from time to time commanded to commit acts of needless violence against civilians at home or abroad (such as Iraq or Afghanistan)?
They, too, are often acting from fear—fear of their superiors. We've all read stories or seen movies such as House on Haunted Hill, in which the power of evil turns people's deepest fears or darkest secrets against them. That's how it is with the few thousand people, mainly in Washington and Manhattan, who turn our fears or weaknesses against us. They have this power because our fears give them this power.
What if we truly supported our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan? I don't mean supporting the wars that are decimating the troops with post traumatic stress syndrome and killer diseases that the government denies even exist and later downplays. What if private citizens held the Veterans Administration's feet to the fire used every legal means to get them to “care for him who will have borne the battle and for his widow, and his orphan,” which is their job anyway?
More and more servicemen are refusing to return to wars in which their own government refuses to support them. It's only a matter of time before whole units refuse to go. What if the troops were ordered into a third war, in Iran, and nobody went?
For eight years, Dick Cheney, through his puppet George W. Bush, ruled America through fear—fear of Muslims, fear of immigrants, fear of a government that was supposedly “of the people, by the people, [and] for the people.” Barack Obama was elected on the promise of change and hope. What we got instead was more of the same under the de facto President Rahm Emanuel.
Fear can serve constructive purposes. I think of fear as the Almighty's way of telling us that something requires our attention. Fear is also the devil's way of telling us that all is hopeless. Hope is the blessed assurance that heaven hears our prayers has everything under control.
If 305 million Americans fear heaven and have learned to set aside their fears of each other, then we have nothing to fear from a few thousand embezzlers and petty despots.