Be Ready For Blatant Liberal Propaganda From “Journalists”

I’ve said it and documented it before, so there’s no reason to waste my already-too-limited creativity saying the same thing in a slightly different way. In my article, “Pre/Post-Election Craziness: Media Rewriting Its Propaganda,” I wrote:

The media has been so blatantly biased throughout its election coverage that it is completely accurate to say that we are now in a propaganda state. There is no possible way that Republicans can win in this media climate: whether you look at the Media Research Center, or at the Project for Excellence in Journalism (or again at their brand new study), or at the University of Wisconsin’s Wisconsin Advertising Project, there is widespread agreement with one longtime ABC journalist that the media is dangerously biased. Pew Research discovered that Americans believe by a 70% to 9% margin that the media is biased in favor of Obama and against McCain. The media now represents a fifth column of government – a propaganda wing – that attacks conservatives and celebrates and defends Democrats and their ideology. Democracy is going extinct in the country that founded democracy, because no free society can survive such a climate of propaganda.

There is NEVER a shortage of blatant media bias, dishonesty, corruption, and propaganda. So this is a story that will go on and on until all traces of our democratic republic are long-since eradicated.

Let’s take a moment to look at one particularly “honored” and “esteemed” “journalist,” Chris Matthews of NBC/MSNBC. Following President Bush’s last formal address as President, when even many liberals would probably try to be gracious given their huge victory, Chris Matthews couldn’t help himself during what amounts to a controlled rant on MSNBC:

Click here for the video or read the transcript below:

CHRIS MATTHEWS: The scary thing about the last eight years is that George Bush, whatever you think of him, came to office pretty much tabula rasa in terms of philosophy. He didn’t have much. He was a rich kid driving his father’s car. He got to be President because of his father, let’s face it, the same way he got into school and everything else, the same way he got his car probably. But the scary thing about Bush is somewhere he came to meet people like Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby and Paul Wolfowitz and Feith and the rest of them. They had this ideology that he bought in to, this ideology that somehow the United States in waging war and taking over countries somehow was fighting for freedom, and somehow in doing so we would encourage a moderation in the Arab world. Well, history would have taught him, and I know he just put down history by quoting Jefferson which was unfair to Jefferson, history would have told him that in the Arab world, it’s the Arab street, it’s the regular people out there, the vast population in numbers, who oppose the state of Israel, who have always been radicalized. It’s been the leaders that you could deal with, the potentates, the kings we set up over there, the British did, the people that were propped up with oil wealth. We could deal with those people, but the minute the street had a hand in the politics over there, it was radical.

Look what happened under him. Algeria had a chance at radical politics, and look what we got there, a bit of, a taste of that. Hamas elected on the West Bank, that did a great deal for peace-making in the Middle East. The election of Ahmadinejad. The idea that somehow the mechanical nature of holding elections, somehow moderates a country. He said it again in his speech tonight that somehow elections and democracy and freedom lead to a moderation on the part of these people. Well, these people have a problem in the Middle East. They want to fight. They don’t like Israel. They don’t like the West. There’s a real seething anger over there towards the West. We better start to figure it out instead of retreating to these notions that he’s been carrying around with him ever since he met Dick Cheney and the neo-conservatives.

I go back to this. The scary thing about Bush is he picked up on — almost in the way that a hermit crab does — another identity in becoming President. He didn’t have a book knowledge to come to the White House with, having ignored and made fun of at college the pointy heads, he called them, or the intellectuals. He made fun of the smart kids at school and hung around with the jocks.

He decided he’s going to start listening to the intellectuals, so he said this Paul Wolfowitz is such a smart guy, let’s go with this neo-conservative idea, let’s go into Iraq. He listened to Dick Cheney, he listened to the rest of them. And, all of a sudden, he became this new scholar of freedom, and he’s going to spend the rest of his life selling this stuff. This stuff cost the lives of 100,000 Iraqis, it cost the lives of 4,000 U.S. service people, and we don’t know what’s coming around the corner in Iraq. The Brits took over that part of the world and turned it into a series of monarchies. We’ve taken over and we supply it with our ideology. Well, we’ll see if it lasts because, in the end, the Arabs are going to have their own culture, their own politics, and down the road, we’re going to have to make peace with the elements we can find to make peace with.

The idea that we have some brand new neo-conservative ideology of freedom that’s going to bring peace over in that part of the world is not true, and he’s still selling it, and that’s the tragedy of the last eight years. He’s learned the wrong lessons, and he’s out there selling them again tonight.

As the President who led our nation to an unprecedented 52 month-long streak of economic growth (see also US News & World Report‘s, “Big Media Distorts Bush Economic Record“) and kept our nation safe from terrorist attack for 7 years leaves office, Chris Matthews – in a blatant display of warped and biased propaganda – could not say a single positive or gracious thing about him or his presidency.

Stop and think about how absolutely shrill and unhinged Chris Matthews is being here. At a time when Barack Obama is demonstrating the massively-over-the-top-hubris of comparing himself to our greatest President – Abraham Lincoln – on every level imaginable (including being the first president to take his oath of office on the Lincoln Bible and retracing the Lincoln inaugural route), Chris Matthews sees fit to attack George Bush for merely using a quote from Thomas Jefferson.

Sorry, Barry. But to allude to John the Baptist (see Matthew 3:11), you aint even fit to remove Lincoln’s shoes. Too bad we don’t get to see a, “Senator, I served with Abe Lincoln: I knew Abe Lincoln; Abe Lincoln was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Abe Lincoln” type-moment in our national lexicon. Instead, we continue to see conservatives reprimanded for even quoting past presidents, while liberals like Obama get to bathe in self-deluding comparisons to our very greatest leaders.

And – also in a reference to John F. Kennedy – where does Chris Matthews get off excoriating George Bush for being “a rich kid” “who got to be President because of his father”? Excuse me, you liberal shill, but does that not describe John F. Kennedy to a “T”? How DARE you point a finger at Bush, when there are three fingers pointing back at Democrat-darling Kennedy on the same condemnation! Why won’t you be objective and fair for just one nanosecond of your career?

Furthermore, it is easy to debunk the blatant insult that Chris Matthews and liberal journalists have been propagating for years: that George W. Bush – who graduated from both Harvard and Yale, and who had a better GPA than celebrated-for-his-brilliance Al Gore and a higher SAT AND IQ score than also-celebrated for his brilliance John Kerry – is a thoughtful and educated man who has continued his own self-education with prodigious reading. It was immoral of the media to portray Bush as a monkey-faced resurrection of “Curious George” and depict him as sitting at a little school desk while Dick Cheny ran the country. But that’s precisely what these media ideologues did.

Matthews – arrogant, smarmy, elitist, pseudo-intellectual, pompous windbag that he is – said of George W. Bush, “He didn’t have a book knowledge to come to the White House with.” Does this miserable fool really think that the less-than-half-of-one term junior Senator from Illinois Barack Obama has any better experience than a man who had been a successful Governor and chief executive of one of the largest states in the nation before assuming the presidency?

Then we can get to the substance of Chris Matthews’ despicable, soul-shriveled argumentation regarding the Matthews’ view of the superiority of tyrannical despots to democratic governments.

I turn to a liberal writing on the Daily Kos to point out just how blatantly evil Chris Matthew’s diatribe really is. In an article titled, “Chris Matthews prefers Middle Eastern despots to democracies,” Shellac (who agrees with all Matthews’ blatantly unfair damnation of Bush) writes:

The fact that Arab countries may elect somebody we do not like does not mean we should support pro-western despots. I think it is a progressive ideal that people deserve to live free from oppression, and I am ashamed that someone who purports to be from the left can go on Countdown and make this type of a statement without so much as a peep from the normally outspoken Olbermann.

He goes on to conclude:

So should we go back to the days of the British Empire and the Cold War and prop up those dictators that we like? I would certainly hope not.

Chris Matthews words disturb me. I think his words are racist, somehow thinking that Arabs want something different from what we in the West want. That they don’t deserve to have elections.

I do not want to use the word “freedom”, as it seems that Bush has co-opted it for his right-wing agenda, but I hope that those progressive minded individuals on this site whom I greatly admire and respect do wish for the same privileges for their fellow man in the middle east that they themselves enjoy now.

Shellac is write – at least for the most part – in his condemnation of Matthews’ position as shockingly wrong and even evil. But I don’t think Shellac understands the depths of the hypocrisy that characterizes a “journalist” like Chris Matthews (and let me add in other names such as Keith Olbermann and Bill Moyers). It amounts to this: when Bush does it, it’s evil; when Obama does the same damn thing, it will be “politically brilliant” in its “bipartisan spirit.”

What we see exemplified in the “journalism” of Chris Matthews and the tens of thousands of little “mini-Matthews” that dominate the media today is an unrelenting hostility to all things Republican and an adoration of all things liberal.

Let me cite Chris Matthews from an earlier moment on Obama. Fortunately, in this single rare instance, there was a an actual journalist like Joe Scarborough on hand to reveal Matthews as the insult to journalism that the man truly is:

Chris Matthews: “I Want To Do Everything I Can To Make This New Presidency Work”

Huffington Post | Danny Shea | November 6, 2008 10:48 AM

Chris Matthews appeared on “Morning Joe” Thursday morning, and in the context of discussing the Obama transition — and Rahm Emanuel’s motives for waffling on the chief of staff position — told Joe Scarborough it is not his job to question Emanuel’s motives.

“You know what?” Matthews said. “I want to do everything I can to make this thing work, this new Presidency work.”

Scarborough and co-host Mika Brzezinski pressed Matthews on his claim, asking if it his his job as a journalist to make the Presidency work.

“Yeah, that’s my job. My job is to help this country…to make this work successfully, because this country needs a successful Presidency, more than anything right now,” Matthews said.

“As Americans, Chris Matthews, we are all rooting for the success of Barack Obama,” Scarborough said. “America is at a perilous time. But you just talked about being a journalist, and your job as a journalist is not to question motives. Then, two seconds later, you said your job was to make this Presidency a success. That’s curious.”

I could not help but enjoy the take on this exchange that I found via a CNN transcript:

CHRIS MATTHEWS, MSNBC: I want to do everything I can to make this thing work, this new presidency work. And I think…

JOE SCARBOROUGH, MSNBC: Is that your job? You just talked about being a journalist.

MATTHEWS: Yes, that’s my job. My job is to help this country.

SCARBOROUGH: So your job as a journalist is to make this presidency work?

MATTHEWS: To make this work successfully, because this country needs a successful presidency more than anything right now.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MCMANUS: That is not the job of the reporters covering Barack Obama. Chris Matthews, you will recall, is the pundit who had a thrill running all the way up his leg when he heard Barack Obama speak. So…

KURTZ: And apparently it hasn’t vanished.

MCMANUS: I guess it’s still there. I think he needs to see a neurologist.

Matthews should STOP pretending to be a journalist and START taking his medications. Or, to put it another way: where the hell was Chris Matthew’s blatantly hypocritical “my job is to help this country” “patriotism” for the last 8 years when he was an unrelenting critic of the entire Bush presidency? Didn’t this country need a “successful presidency” in the midst of 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and the like?

Matthews has had many “moments” that defy anything that could even faintly be called “journalistic objectivity”:

“I’ve been following politics since I was about 5,” said Mr. Matthews. “I’ve never seen anything like this. This is bigger than Kennedy. [Obama] comes along, and he seems to have the answers. This is the New Testament. This is surprising.”

And now let me speak about who is REALLY “scary” and “dangerous.” And it isn’t George Bush.

I am convinced that the United States of America is doomed. It is not just that Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid will lead this country to disaster. It is worse than that. It is that the American mainstream media – falling prey to propaganda like Joseph Goebbels and the Nazis or TASS and the Soviet Union – will not allow disasterous policies to be portrayed as negative until it is too late.

Right now, just for one example, Nancy Pelosi in a rank abuse of power is massively abusing her power to change century-old rules to freeze Republicans and even moderate Democrats out by refusing to let them expose pork by calling for a public vote. And few in the media seem to care about this prodigious step toward disaster.

We could probably recover from a few years of bad socialist leadership if the media did the job of exposing government power-grabbing, stupidity, waste, and corruption, but democracy itself cannot long survive a climate of media propaganda. A people kept in the dark and fed on horseshit (to quote a military expression) cannot possibly elect good leaders who will pursue good policies when the truth is misrepresented for the sake of political ideology. Like the soldiers who ended up filling body bags because they were not allowed to know the truth they needed to know, our very nation is doomed to perish.

Tags: Barack Obama