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| A Small Step for Dynamic Tax Analysis | Islamic World Choosing Segregation from West |
After Cheney Tantrum Is MSM Still Relevant?
by Christopher Chantrill
February 16, 2006 at 3:07 am
WILL THE BUSH Administration get away with stiff-arming the Mainstream Media over the Cheney shooting incident?
Obviously, the tactics after the hunting accident, in which Vice President Cheney shot lawyer Harry Whittington Saturday afternoon, were intended to keep the whole thing low key. But the Vice President and the White House miscalculated over one thing. They did not forsee that the MSM White House corps would go ballistic over the insult to their customary right to be the first to report on White House matters.
Or did they? Could they be that smart? Did they figure that the MSM would spend the next week in outrage, proving the adage that hell hath no fury like, let’s say, a prima donna scorned? No, surely not. They called the local Corpus Christi newspaper in order to slide the news of the accident into the public consciousness gently. Next thing they knew, the MSM went ballistic.
But when on Wednesday the vice president gave an exclusive interview to Fox News, the administration insulted the fading CNN, which thought that they should have got in on the action.
And the Democrats are in on the act too. They are outraged too. But then they are outraged about everything.
At least the Washington Post is staying on an even keel and reporting the news pretty straight. After all, the real takeaway is the vice president’s statement:
"Ultimately, I’m the guy who pulled the trigger and fired the round that hit Harry," Cheney said in a hastily arranged White House interview with Fox News Channel anchor Brit Hume. "And you can talk about all of the other conditions that existed at the time, but that’s the bottom line. And there’s no -- it was not Harry’s fault. You can’t blame anybody else. I’m the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend. And I say that is something I’ll never forget."
It’s something to think about. That the story is about Dick Cheney accidentally shooting his friend, not about the wounded feelings of insulted news media celebrities.
The question is: Can the Bushies get away with this? Can they ignore the wails and the ragings of the MSM?
If they can, it will be another sign that the world is changing, that a new world is aborning.
Sphere: Related Content |Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Liberal Coercion
[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State
Churches
[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Conservatism's Holy Grail
What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph
Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture
These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
Drang nach Osten
There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion
Government Expenditure
The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Living Law
The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital
German Philosophy
The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since
1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and
philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be
inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West
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