-By Warner Todd Huston
Water cooler talk about the ABC show “Scandal” might make one wonder what he’s been missing by not tuning in. But after a viewing or two, some may feel the series is missing a certain lifelike quality.
After all, it might seem a bit too fantastic when even the most corner-cutting, self-centered and unethical characters on the show seem to have higher standards of conduct than today’s media elites. And that right there is the real scandal.
Take the recent debacle over Rolling Stone magazine’s so-called blockbuster story of rape on the University of Virginia campus. After making a big splash about the evils of “privileged” university fraternities, the story completely fell apart with nearly every “fact” in the piece proving out to be a lie. The magazine has since repudiated its own story.
Let’s take a moment to acknowledge that honest mistakes in stories like this happen from time to time. Show me a journalist who’s never been lied to by a source, and I’ll show you a reporter who hasn’t been in the profession very long.
But what Rolling Stone did is far worse than failing to dot an “i,” or cross a “t,” or somehow forgetting to run down some small detail or two. The magazine simply printed verbatim a sensational story filled with allegations of numerous felony sexual assaults without verifying even the most basic claims. It also published alleged dialogue that no human being would ever utter.
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The Real World of Journalism is Worse Than ‘Scandal’”
This is why I despise government. Every decision made in DC adds thousands of new government placemen at a cost of millions in salary and an ever expanding government. That is what happened when John Boehner did not immediately put a stop to Obama’s amnesty plans in that recently concluded budget negotiations.
It isn’t as if we needed another example to prove that liberalism makes bad people, but this week we got a story in the Washington Times of the University of Virginia student who isn’t sorry he destroyed thousands of dollars in private property even though he discovered that he was trying to “punish” a fraternity for a rape that never happened.
In an example of conflation that beats the band, a tech blogger on the tech site Scripting News thought he had a brilliant reason why cops are killing more people than ever in this country. It’s because we revere our soldiers, he quixotically said.
Al Sharpton is able to fly around the country advocating for violent protests and the murder of cops because many of the nation’s top corporations have fallen for his shakedown efforts and give him millions to fund his activities. It is time to pressure these corporations to stop finding this charlatan’s efforts.
Left-wing pushers of political correctness have been trying to find any legal thread to force the NFL’s Washington DC-based football team to stop using the name “Redskins,” a word that activists claim is “racist.” The left’s most recent attempt was to get the FCC to rule that “Redskins” was “profane” and so cannot be used on the air because it breaks profanity rules. But the FCC just ruled against the liberal’s effort to redefine the team name as a profanity.
Shep Smith is at it again, this time he was heard on his Fox News show lamenting how America will “ruin” Cuba now that Obama is opening up diplomatic relations with that island nation. No, seriously. That is exactly what he said. This idiot really needs to go work for the commies at MSNBC.
On Monday, the Senate has approved Vivek Murthy to be the next U.S. surgeon general. Murthy is many things, of course, he is a far, far left-wing activist, and a stolid liberal, but one thing he definitely is, is a major anti-gun nut, a man who hates the US Constitution.
Kwanzaa, the purported “African” holiday celebrated only in the United States, is the ultimate politically correct holiday. It is little observed, even by our own African American community, of course, but those that do celebrate it are wholly unaware that this faux holiday was created in 1965 by a man with a very troubled past. For Kwanzaa’s creator, Maulana Karenga, has a violent, racist criminal record, and is even a rapist who was convicted of torturing his victims.
Instead of concerning itself with our national defense, the new Senate National Defense Authorization Act provides for the federal government to steal millions of acres of land from western states like Montana.
I think this has to be the funniest recent story highlighting the foolishness on the campuses of our universities. On Thursday a group of “silent” protesters got in a war of words with naked-run “primal scream” participants at Harvard. The Ferguson protesters were upset that the primal screamers were ignoring them and refusing to join in with their “moment of silence” so they began to scold and whine to the primal screamers, all to no avail.
Hear that pounding at your door? It is the Beloit, Wisconsin, police chief demanding that you allow him and his jackbooted thug officers to roam through your house looking for guns. Seriously. That is what Chief Norm Jacobs wants citizens of his town to allow.
A taxpayer paid professor in Denver is forcing students to recite a satirical version of the pledge of allegiance that attacks the United States for targeting blacks and women and says that Republicans are homophobic and against “the poor.”
The police Chief of Austin, the most left-wing city in Texas, is demanding that citizens tell police if they have a friend, neighbor or family member who loves guns. You read that right. Just like in Soviet times when the KGB demanded that people inform on each other, this officer of the law is demanding that citizens snitch on anyone that owns a gun so police can create some sort of hit list of gun owners in the city.
A group of some 24 liberal mayors from across the country have come together in order to help President Obama implement his amnesty policies.
Oprah Winfrey’s Chicago-based TV studios and Chicago landmark building Sears Tower (now Willis Tower) were the subject of a previously undiscovered terror bombing plot, a new report reveals.
The pointless and illicit rioting in Ferguson, Missouri is a perfect example of all that is wrong with the Democrat Party, the unavoidable end game of that party’s actions, and proof of the illegitimacy of everything Democrats do to win elections.
One of the claims that the left is erroneously using to justify Obama’s new amnesty policy is that he has the “prosecutorial discretion” to do what he is doing and on Thursday Fox News’ Dana Perino agreed with the left that Obama does, indeed, have that power.
Inner city blacks have a skewed and untrue view of what America “is” today and it is because they live in all black neighborhoods. This often self-imposed isolation is also why white people don’t understand why blacks don’t see the progress that blacks have made in this country.
Hillary Clinton has been pretty silent over Obama’s amnesty. She has not chastised this president for his abuse of power. But this might seem to be inconsistent with her past comments because there have been at least five times when she said that our presidents need to be reigned in and have their powers limited.
The man who was trying to shop the Gruber videos to the media was rebuffed by the Old Media Establishment repeatedly because they had no interest in highlighting the fact that Obama and his Obamacare cohorts were lying to the American people about the President’s signature healthcare law.
Transparency, shmansparency. Once again we see a government doing its level best to keep you, the people, from being able to find out what it is that government is doing to you. This time it is in failing Illinois where lawmakers are trying to make it much, much harder to fulfill a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
After the murder of American hostage and aide worker Peter Kassig by members of the Islamist terror group ISIS, Obama claimed that Christians were more responsible for terrorism than Muslims are.
Only days after the 2014 election that gave Illinois a new business-minded, tax-cutting Republican as its new Governor, Illinois State Senator and nominal Republican Dave Syverson gave us all a perfect example of why the Illinois GOP is such a crashing failure when he chirped up that he’d love to make the “temporary” state income tax hike permanent, BEFORE the new Governor even gets a chance to take office.
After the shellacking that President Obama received at the hands of voters in the midterm elections, his chief advisor, Valerie Jarrett is finally in the hot seat. Over the weekend, two articles attacked her as all that is wrong with the White House with one piece slamming her the “Obama whisperer” and another one flat out advising Obama to fire her.