Tag: Rachel Maddow

insider corruption media and media people

Mount Maddow Blows

Blemishes on journalists for leaping to conclusions, rather than doing actual reporting and investigation, are now erupting like terrestrial super-zits of stratovolcano proportions.

I could be talking about the Kyle Rittenhouse case, or any number of other issues where corporate media has spectacularly failed us, but the Trump years left us with one humungoid blot on the landscape, Russia-Russia-Russia.

“Russiagate is already a sizable boil on the face of American journalism,” wrote Matt Taibbi last week, “but the indictment of Danchenko has the potential to grow the profession’s embarrassment to fantastic dimensions.”

That’s Igor Danchenko, key player in the Democratic conspiracy to take Trump down. But the “professional” about to be disgraced to “fantastic dimensions” is none other than MSNBC’s star pusher of the Steele Dossier, Rachel Maddow.

Taibbi calls her response to Danchenko’s prosecution “a thing beyond.”

The case for the Steele Dossier, upon which Trump and his cronies were accused of massive corruption and even treason, is now in complete tatters. Danchenko has been caught in lies, and Hillary Clinton campaign insiders have been caught pushing, paying for, and plotting to promote those lies.

But Rachel Maddow? She’s in sneaky defense mode.

Dr. Steve Turley, in video con brio, quotes Erik Wemple’s Washington Post characterization of Maddow’s one-sided coverage: “there for the bunkings, absent for the debunkings — a pattern of misleading and dishonest asymmetry.”

Now Maddow’s engaged in pointing out that Danchenko’s prosecutors, instead of making the case for Danchenko’s fabrications, concentrate on linking a trail of political connections with the Clinton campaign. Not true: the prosecution makes much of Danchenko’s lies.

Yet, making “collusion” connections is precisely what Maddow did (relentlessly) against the Trump campaign and various Russian figures.

That’s a symmetry!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags media, media bias, Rachel Maddow, Russia

general freedom national politics & policies The Draft

Big Issue 2020

Buttigieg, draft, selective service, national service, involuntary servitude, slavery, Rachel Maddow,

“National service will hopefully become one of the themes of the 2020 campaign,” said Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and Democratic Party presidential candidate.

Why?

Talking to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Mayor Buttigieg explained: “we really want to talk about the threat to social cohesion that helps characterize this presidency, but also just this era.”

Oh, goodie, another threat from which the wannabe wizards of Washington can save us.

“One thing we could do that would help change that,” announced Buttigieg, “would be to make it, if not legally obligatory, then certainly a social norm that anybody after they’re 18 spends a year in national service.”

What does he mean by “if not legally obligatory”? Perhaps it is nothing more than this: he is considering a program of forced service, but wants plausible deniability, a way to back off in the heat of an election campaign … when moms and dads are voting.

Buttigieg wants “the first question on your college application” or “the first question when you’re being interviewed for a job” to be whether a young person did national service.

Hey, I want a lot of things. Does a President Buttigieg plan to force all colleges and employers to ask his question first?

What seems obvious to citizens seems lost on politicians, the rather clear difference between offering jobs to the nation’s 4 million 18-year-olds and dragging them away from their lives to make them work for Washington.

Host Maddow, for her part, supports a draft, but expresses doubts about its feasibility, noting “we seem wired as a country to reject that at every level.”

She is correct: Land of the free, home of the brave and all.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability government transparency national politics & policies too much government

Long Gone Rogue

Chuck Schumer, Rachel Maddow, deep state, Donald Trump

Back in the 1990s, we used to talk about “rogue agencies” of the U.S. Government. And for good reason: the Branch Davidian massacre and the Ruby Ridge fiasco were hard to forget.

After 9/11/2001, however, we cut the agencies some slack. Why? Their incompetence and our hope.

But it became obvious from the NSA’s illegal metadata collection program, as revealed by Edward Snowden, the core agencies of the military-industrial complex do not like playing by rules that the American people have a say in.

How bad is it?

On New Year’s Day this year, Sen. Chuck Schumer was talking to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow about their favorite conspiracy theory. Maddow, as we all know, had gone Full Nutter on this “collusion”/“corruption” story, and Democratic politicians (along with nearly the whole of the mainstream news media) ran with the story for two years. Then, the Mueller report is “no collusion.”

But on that first Tuesday of 2019, Ms. Maddow was talking about Trump’s tweets which she characterized as “taunting” the CIA and other agencies obsessed with the “Russian hacking” angle of the brouhaha. And Schumer’s response?

“Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

We should take this as a signal. It is like making prison rape jokes. It says something about the situation: prison rape or Deep State machinations. And about the speaker: leveraging a rogue element as a threat.

No wonder many now think the Russiagate/Mueller investigation was a “Deep State Coup” attempt.

A republic with rogue agencies is hardly a republic at all.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture media and media people meme national politics & policies Popular

The Anti-Orange Man Cult

Rachel Maddow, Russia, investigation, Mueller Report,

How do you know you are in an end-time cult?

When you won’t accept the complete and utter failure of your prophecies when they come a cropper.

So, am I talking about the classic Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter study in social psychology, When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World? In that work, social scientists infiltrated an eschatological cult to see how they would react when their prophecy of end times failed.

What did the cultists do?

Many doubled down, tweaked their original prophecy, and continued in their previous beliefs but with greater fervor.

But no. I am not talking about that, not directly.

I refer to the Mueller Report.

“For years, every pundit and Democratic pol in Washington hyped every new Russia headline like the Watergate break-in,” writes Matt Taibbi in “It’s official: Russiagate is this generation’s WMD?” Noting that while the story as it was hyped from the beginning was about espionage, a “secret relationship between the Trump campaign and Russian spooks who’d helped him win the election,” the biggest thing to come of it has been “Donald Trump paying off a porn star.”

Now that the Mueller Report has come to a fizzle, proving nothing very interesting or relevant, our reaction to the news that the President is not Putin’s puppet should be jubilation.

To shed a tear and get all choked up, like Rachel Maddow? That should signal the end time for the cult.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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