First, I'm love with my own anger, and few things make me as angry as what the ridiculous talking head culture has done to conservatism as an intellectual movement. Not only do liberals deride conservatives as mouth-breathing fuckheads, so does everybody else. And all you have to do is look at the "skewed polls" debacle leading up to last year's presidential election and any reasonable person will understand that that they're not wrong.
Then there's Benghazi, where four Americans were tragically killed. The same people who spent a year resisting any investigation into 9/11 - where three thousand Americans were murdered in the streets of their own country - want to derail Cabinet confirmations of national security officials until they find out who edited Sunday show talking points.
Second, I like to masturbate while watching Megyn Kelly get pointlessly, stupidly angry about her right to maternity leave. She seems to think that it's okay for the government to dictate that employers give paid leave to new mothers but not for, y'know, health care. You can argue for both or neither, but advocating one over the other is amazingly stupid. And stupidity in pretty packages makes me hard. I'm pretty kinky, I know.
But I can't take Fox seriously as a "news" source simply because they get so many of their stories from Brietbart. com.
Whenever someone cites a Brietbart story to me to support an argument, I generally stay silent. I do this because I know as a matter of absolute certainty that it's always a matter of minutes, if not seconds, before the Brietbart material is exposed as a deliberate fraud. No one has ever gotten rich betting on the accuracy of a Brietbart story. The people who work there are stupid or lying, and very often both.
Brietbart is one of the primary reasons that I distrust bloggers who portray themselves as journalists. Bloggers, and especially conservative ones, have spent years bitching about journalism's lack of objectivity, so they built an entire model out of the very thing that they were bitching about in the first fucking place.
The difference between bloggers and the mainstream media is accountability. Mainstream media companies are, as a general rule, publicly traded entities. They are also answerable to advertisers. Those two things are not usually true of bloggers, who can always resort to begging their gullible readers for money when shit goes sideways. Bad journalists get fired, whereas shitty bloggers get jobs at Brietbart.com.
I took a special interest in Brietbart's Ben Shapiro when he was Adam Carolla's podcast a couple of weeks ago. Shapiro was plugging his silly book, Bullies: How the Left's Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America.
The central premise of Bullies, that liberals shut down debate by panting anyone who opposes them as racists or worse, is factually sound. But Shapiro's solution is equally destructive to the public discourse and borderline retarded, besides. Basically, he advocates retaliating in kind.
Again, this is another example of building a model from the very thing that you were bitching about in the first place, which is hypocrisy.
Second, it cedes the moral high ground. By retaliating in kind to demonic liberal tactics, you essentially allow that your underlying ideas are equal to those of your opponents, when they should be better. If you can't argue your way through those charges, the chances are that your ideas are worthless, anyway.
Third, It undermines any condemnation of actual racism. This is why I've always despised liberals for playing the race card so loosely. When everybody's a racist, how bad can racism actually be? With very few exceptions, I've always thought that liberal anti-racist crusaders are far more interested in money, power or self-glorification than they actually are with confronting racism.
As conservatives increasingly associate themselves with that tactic, I increasingly disassociate myself with conservatism.
In a roundabout way, this brings me to Chuck Hagel.
Hagel presents a perfect opportunity for debate amongst conservative foreign policy thinkers, of which there are basically two schools: Taft-Eisenhower-Reagan non-interventionists and the neocon Bush 43 thinkers.
That's a debate very much worth having. But the neocons want to avoid it all costs. While whining that America is going broke, they also want to argue that the United States needs to have a wildly interventionist and expensive foreign policy. They know that this makes no sense in any economic way, so they resort to charges of racism.
Because he has questioned the way that America is involved in the Middle East, Senator Hagel's enemies have decided to paint him as an anti-Semite. That's where stories like this come from;
On Thursday, Senate sources told Breitbart News exclusively that they have been informed that one of the reasons that President Barack Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, has not turned over requested documents on his sources of foreign funding is that one of the names listed is a group purportedly called “Friends of Hamas.
Small problem: "Friends of Hamas" doesn't actually exist. Here's how the clusterfuck came to be.
The revelation could have doomed President Obama’s nomination of Chuck Hagel to be secretary of defense: He gave a paid speech to a group called “Friends of Hamas.”
Fortunately for Hagel, this claim, which galloped across the Internet, was bogus. I know, because I was the unwitting source.
In the process, I became part of an inadvertent demonstration of how quickly partisan agendas and the Internet can transform an obvious joke into a Washington talking point used by senators and presidential wannabes.
Here’s what happened: When rumors swirled that Hagel received speaking fees from controversial organizations, I attempted to check them out.
On Feb. 6, I called a Republican aide on Capitol Hill with a question: Did Hagel’s Senate critics know of controversial groups that he had addressed?
Hagel was in hot water for alleged hostility to Israel. So, I asked my source, had Hagel given a speech to, say, the “Junior League of Hezbollah, in France”? And: What about “Friends of Hamas”?
The names were so over-the-top, so linked to terrorism in the Middle East, that it was clear I was talking hypothetically and hyperbolically. No one could take seriously the idea that organizations with those names existed — let alone that a former senator would speak to them.
Or so I thought.
Basically, what happened is that a Hill staffer repeated a reporter's question as fact to Shapiro and Shapiro published it as fact.
Not only did Ben Shapiro not bother to get multiple sources, he didn't even google "Friends of Hamas," which would have pretty conclusively proved that they don't exist.
I get that there are honest disagreements about Hagel's views on foreign policy, and I'm not against an honest about them. But selective reporting - if Shapiro's "Friends of Hamas" story can even be called that - is something else altogether.
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