The Bookworm Beat 8/1/16 — the “media bias” edition and open thread

Woman-writing-300x265I never go looking for legal work, but when my old clients ask for help, I always say “yes.” They were there when my husband was not established in his career and we had children to feed and rent to pay, so I will be there when they have a deadline they can’t meet without my help. Still, I’m tired, really tired, after a two-day marathon to get a complaint into bankruptcy court. I’ll therefore strive for brevity in this round-up, relying more on quotations from the posts I’m highlighting than on my own commentary.

Nothing Trump says is as radical as anything Obama has done. I think Victor Davis Hanson is a closet #NeverHillary. How else to explain his excellent point; namely, that Trump is much less extreme in his views than Obama has been in his actions. To which I’ll add that the real difference is that the media loathes Trump and adored Obama (and has invested in Hillary despite disliking her). Here’s VDH:

Amid the anguish over the Trump candidacy, we often forget that the present age of Obama is already more radical than most of what even Trump has blustered about. We live in a country for all practical purposes without an enforceable southern border. Over 300 local and state jurisdictions have declared themselves immune from federal immigration laws — all without much consequence and without worry that a similar principle of nullification was the basis of the American Civil War or that other, more conservative cities could in theory follow their lead and declare themselves exempt from EPA jurisdiction or federal gun-registration laws. Confederate nullification is accepted as the new normal, and, strangely, its antithesis of border enforcement and adherence to settled law is deemed xenophobic, nativist, and racist.

The president of the United States, on matters from immigration to his own health-care act, often has declined to enforce federal laws — sometimes because it was felt that to do so would have been injurious to his 2012 reelection bid. The reputations of agencies such as the IRS and the VA no longer really exist; we concede that they are politicized, corrupt, or hopelessly inept. An attorney general being found in contempt of Congress raises no more of an eyebrow than that same chief law-enforcement officer referring to African Americans as “my people” or writing off Americans in general as a “nation of cowards.”

An imperfect Donald is better than a disastrous Hillary. Dennis Prager has finally figured out what we here already grasped which is that, no matter how bad Trump is, Hillary is worse. Moreover, those who refuse to vote for Trump or, worse, promise to vote for Hillary, have become so invested in some abstract purity that they’re abandoning even the possibility of preserving conservative principles in America:

The choice this November is tragic. As often happens in life, the choice is between bad and worse, not bad and good.

But America has made that choice before. When forced to choose between bad and worse, we supported Stalin against Hitler, and we supported right-wing authoritarians against Communist totalitarians.

It seems to me that anti-Trump conservatives want to remain morally pure. I understand that temptation. I am tempted, too. But if you wish to vanquish the bad, it is not possible – at least not on this side of the afterlife – to remain pure.

The most moving interview of my 33 years in radio was with Irene Opdyke, a Polish Catholic woman. Opdyke became the mistress of a married Nazi officer in order to save the lives of 12 Jews. She hid them in the cellar of the officer’s house in Warsaw. There were some Christians who called my show to say Opdyke’s actions were wrong, that she had in fact sinned because she knowingly committed a mortal sin. In their view, she compromised Catholic/Christian doctrine.

In my view – and, I believe, the view of most Catholics and other Christians – she brought glory to her God and her faith. Why? Because circumstances almost always determine what is moral, even for religious people like myself who believe in moral absolutes. That’s why the act of dropping atom bombs on Japan was moral. The circumstances (ending a war that would otherwise continue taking millions of lives) made moral what under other circumstances would be immoral.

In the 2016 presidential race, I am not interested in moral purity. I am interested in defeating the left and its political arm, the Democratic Party. The notion (expressed by virtually every anti-Trump conservative) that we can live with another four years of a Democratic president is, forgive me, mind-boggling.

Hold your nose in November and vote for bad, because worse is truly the end of our constitutional republic.

The media isn’t even pretending to be objective anymore. Pat Caddell, a Democrat himself, is disgusted with the drive-by media. (I wonder how long before he finally switches parties.) The corruption is rife:

“They [Reuters, which changed its poll process when Trump was leading] not only changed their formula, to put Hillary ahead. They went back and changed the results, for a week of results where Trump was ahead, and then they turned those into Hillary leads,” said Caddell. “They also erased all the former polling off the site. They didn’t tweak their procedure – they cooked it.”

“Never in my life have I seen a news organization, and a supposedly reputable poll, do something so dishonest,” Caddell continued. “What they have done is, they decided the people who said, ‘oh, I’m never for someone’ – oh, those must be Hillary votes. They used to be Trump voters.”

[snip]

He noted that Hillary Clinton made “big news” on Fox News Sunday when she claimed the FBI found her responses to questions about her secret email server to be honest and consistent, when in fact FBI Director James Comey said the opposite, when he declined to refer charges against her to prosecutors.

“That is language from another planet,” Caddell declared. “This woman, to make that assertion after all the proven lies, should be a big story, but it will not be.” He also noted the contrast between how Donald Trump’s appearance on ABC News over the weekend was immediately followed by a round-table of commentators attacking him, but Fox News staged no such ambush of Clinton.

Caddell furthermore dismissed Trump’s ABC News interviewer George Stephanopoulos as “a former Democratic operative, a Clinton contributor, and an absolute fraud as a newsperson.”

“It is unbelievable what he did. He interviewed Trump, and basically then had the Khan family – the Muslim mother and father of the soldier who was killed – and General Allen on to attack Trump after the interview. He showed them the interview and then let attack him, and then loaded a panel with people who are so negative,” Caddell complained.

He found the media far less willing to say anything about the “pall of corruption” hanging over the Democratic convention, or the Democrats’ reluctance to say a word about the issue, knowing how much it hurts Clinton.

“Not once, not once, was there a mention of the Clinton Foundation by Hillary, or Bill, or anybody, about what great work they do, because they dare not even raise it,” he observed. “Nobody said anything. The press, which have universally assaulted Trump, who got a big boost out of his speech – who won the speech by the way, of best speeches, beats her, and the press praises her, and they’re laying down, and this is ‘Reaganesque’ – this is about as Reaganesque as John Kerry in 2004, going up to the podium after all the admirals and generals surrounding him, and saying ‘I’m reporting for duty,’” he said. “I mean, that went over like a lead balloon.”

Caddell’s not exaggerating either. The metrics show that the media didn’t even try for some objectivity. Their entire goal is to destroy Trump and elevate Hillary, just as they succeeded in 2008 and 2012 in elevating Obama while destroying everyone else (including, in 2008, Hillary herself).

Sadly, the Lefties in my world are okay with the dishonesty, because they, along with the journalists telling the lies, see these lies serving a greater good. I guess sharia is already kicking in because the Left is totally on board with Taqiyya.

If Hillary wins, this is coming soon to an American city near you.  Even in 1981, when I lived in England, London was the least English part of it. Then, it was an international, cosmopolitan city. Now, though, move outside of the tourist areas and it’s a third-world, crime-ridden city, complete with new-age slavery:

It is writer Ben Judah’s great achievement to reveal that hidden city in his new book, This Is London: Life And Death In The World City.

A young war correspondent, Judah examines his home city as the foreign metropolis it has now become.

Since 2001, immigration has transformed the capital. More than half of Londoners are now not ethnically British.

As he says: ‘I was born in London, but I no longer recognise this city. I don’t know if I love the new London, or if it frightens me: a city where at least 55 per cent of people are not white British, nearly 40 per cent were born abroad and hundreds of thousands are living illegally, in the shadows.’

[snip]

The English upper classes no longer inhabit the splendid townhouses in Mayfair. Suburbs such as Edmonton in the north of the city are no longer home to the aspirational, largely unionised, English working-class.

As for white, East End gangsters such as the Kray Twins, you will only find those in movies.

The same goes for the prostitutes who used to inhabit Soho. Even tramps, for goodness sake, are rarely English any more. Such is the level of liberal propaganda that we have largely remained blind to this startling transformation of our city.

Judah systematically maps these changes — the result of Labour relaxing immigration into the UK.

[snip]

This week, it emerged that Brussels is attempting to blackmail Britain by saying that if we don’t take as many as 90,000 migrants a year, we will not be able to send failed asylum seekers back to safe countries on the Continent.

Then came the story that a tribunal had ruled that a group of migrants in the Jungle camp in Calais had a ‘human right’ to join family members in Britain. It is a precedent that could have far-reaching implications.

Aside from legal rulings, the truth is that much of our immigration policy is now dictated by criminal trafficking gangs who make a fortune smuggling people into Britain — not our elected leaders and certainly not voters and taxpayers.

It is criminal gangs who decide who comes into the UK and in what numbers. They largely decide what happens to the migrants once they arrive.

[snip]

Judah quickly learns that the people who make it here are ‘virtual slaves’. And it is the same wherever he goes. In a hotel laundry room, Africans curse the tricksters who brought them here on counterfeited visas and passports.

[snip]

There is a whole illegal city in London of several hundred thousand people, and nearly half of them are thought to have arrived after 2001.

This is a city hidden from official statistics, but not hidden from employers who take on the workers, no questions asked, through agencies.

Legal workers also have problems because the sheer number of new arrivals push down wages.

[snip]

Along with immigrants, we have imported the criminal gangs who blight their countries. When it is so easy for migrants to get here, it is just as simple for the world’s nastiest criminals to relocate to the UK, too.

Thus many Somalian gangs terrorise estates in South London and Turkish gangs control North London.

Kurds and Albanians launder their money through the car washes in Tottenham and Kilburn. Vietnamese gangs grow and distribute two-thirds of the strong cannabis on the capital’s streets.

Read the whole thing. It’s devastating — and it’s what Democrats plan for America with their open border, “y’all come in and vote Democrat, now” policies.

Allen West writes a devastating rebuttal to Khizr Khan. Even before it became clear that Khan is a Democrat party operative, Allen West was on to the real hypocrisy in his speech:

I would offer a simple recommendation to Mr. Khan. Perhaps you should have asked President Barack Obama if he had read the Constitution — undoubtedly you would agree we have witnessed a few unconstitutional actions from him.

And while you were at it, Mr. Khan, perhaps you could have asked Hillary Clinton about handling classified information — since I’m quite sure your son, Captain Khan, had at a minimum a secret clearance.

I don’t think your son would have been able to, well, have his “careless” mishandling of classified materials and information simply excused. Perhaps Mr. Khan, you could have addressed the necessity for high standards of honor, integrity, and character in a commander in chief.

Also, I found it interesting Mr. Khan, that you and your wife, an American Gold Star family, would take the stage to support a sitting president and one desiring to be president, who had abandoned Americans in a combat zone and lied about it.

I tend to believe that if alive, your son would consider that type of behavior abhorrent and deplorable. Or perhaps, as it seems, your speech was politically driven, and not based on principle? After all, you did take the stage before a crowd that disrespected a Medal of Honor recipient…is that cool with you?

[snip]

Now, let’s be honest Mr. Khan, those of us with knowledge could just as easily bring attention to SGT Hasan Karim Akbar and Major Nidal Hasan, both Muslims serving in the U.S. Army. Just as you celebrated your Muslim son’s sacrifice, there are others who could give testimony to their loss due to those Muslim soldiers — and I use lower case reference to them (soldiers) because they dishonored the oath and were traitors to our Code of Honor. Your son was not, but that had nothing to do with him being a Muslim: he was an American Soldier.

So, Mr. Khan, since you had such an immense stage, what should you have addressed? You should have taken the time to explain how humbled and thankful you are to live in America. You should have mentioned how honored your son was and the pride you felt knowing he was serving your adopted country. You should have explained to America, and the world, what killed your son…the ideology of Islamism, Islamic fascism.

You could have told all of us why it needed to be defeated and that we need a commander in chief who would not abandon Americans in combat, but ensure they were supported in order to defeat this scourge.

Walid Shoebat, who sometimes draws conclusions that his facts don’t support, suggests that the actual facts about Khan indicate his son son might have enlisted as a Muslim mole who then got killed in his mole role. That’s pure supposition but it reminds us that the mere fact that a Muslim serves does not necessarily mean that he and his family support America in the way that we do (think: Nidal Malik Hasan).

Oh, and here’s a reminder that Democrats definitely do not accord all parents of dead children the same respect.

Don’t canonize Christian martyrs — it will make their Muslim killers angry. The West’s insistence that the only way to “fight” radical Islam is to bow down before, lest we make its practitioners mad, has infected even some Catholics, who have turned into Muslim apologists. My friend Patrick O’Hannigan writes movingly about the New York Times’ wrongheaded (as always) contention, through the vehicle of a guest opinion piece, that Fr. Jacques Hamel, who had his throat slit by a jihadist during a service, shouldn’t be canonized because it will make Muslims mad.

I’m mad. I’m furious. Doesn’t my furor at my country’s and culture’s passivity in the face of a death cult stand for something? Placate me. Go out and kill the bastards.

It’s not just patients who hate Obamacare. Doctors don’t like it either.  This article is by a long-time Democrat physician who thinks Trump offers both doctors and patients a better deal on healthcare.

If you need it, a reminder about just how much the Clintons soiled the White House. I was a Lefty during the 1990s, and was in with the “move on” mindset. It’s only with wisdom and maturity that I’ve learned just how disgusting the Clintons’ scandals were. Do we really want to go through that all over again?

The link in the previous paragraph paints Hillary as something of a victim. She was not. She was an enabler for a sexual predator — her husband, Bill Clinton, President of the United States:

Hillary Clinton has ruthlessly clawed her way to power. She has supporters, but no friends. After decades of victimizing women on behalf of a career sexual predator, she brought that predator up on stage to tell the world how much she loves families and children.

[snip]

The Clintons are criminals who pretend to be activists. They’re greedy thieves who claim to want to make things better. They maintain a thin façade of normalcy as an alibi. It fooled some people a few decades ago. But it’s fooling fewer and fewer people. Even fewer and fewer Democrats.

The academic rot in anthropology. Anthropology started life as a legitimate effort to understand other cultures. It’s now just another part of the anti-American Leftism that infects academia. Philip Carl Salzman has a scathing indictment, looking at it from the inside out:

However, anthropologists, including those studying the Middle East, gradually moved away from a scientific perspective toward a more subjective and politicized view. They were influenced in part by Edward Said, who in Orientalism (1978) argued that Western accounts of the Middle East were fabrications invented to justify imperialist invasion, colonial imposition, and oppression of local peoples. This “postcolonial” view blames Western imperialism for myriad problems worldwide, a view that neglects the cultures and agency of people around the globe.

This intellectual revolution has infected anthropology (among many fields) with a dangerous, self-contradictory nihilism that rejects the possibility of objective Truth toward which we may move and posits many different truths held by different peoples — all equally valid. Yet they behave as if their belief in many truths must be treated as The Truth that must not be questioned.

Anthropologists insist on the relativity of knowledge, except when it comes to their own statements, which they take to be The Absolute Truth.

One should not, however, expect anthropologists who believe in “many truths” to encourage a diversity of opinion within their university departments. Intellectual homogeneity is enforced, with Marxism, postcolonialism, and radical feminism the principal approved paths to enlightenment. Classical liberal beliefs in markets, liberty, and individual rights are verboten.

Smart and moral poor people appreciate conservativism. My parents worked like dogs to keep us in genteel poverty. My rapidly aging, arthritic father spent years working six days a week, leaving the house at 7 a.m. and return at 10 p.m. During some of those years, through a Jewish group we got to know a slightly weird young couple who refused to work and lived on welfare. Every year, they took two vacations: one to Hawaii and one to Mexico. I didn’t grow up thinking “Wow, that’s how I want to scam the system.” I grew up thinking that they were morally corrupt people and that I want a system where I can work, live well, and earn my vacations — and that’s what I did. J.D. Vance had a similar experience to mine.

Don’t rely on Snopes. Snopes once was good at pointing at that the email about the grandmother who gave birth to kittens was — sorry — not true. However, it’s turned into a hard Left outlet that, like all hard Left outlets, does not care about conveying truth. Its concern is to sell Leftism.