Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain. — Frederic Bastiat
As I have said in previous posts every totalitarian and tyrannical dictatorship from has begun on the left. Most recent examples of this fact are the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Maoist China, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, Rwanda and Uganda. All of these tyrannical governments began with the cry of “for the betterment of the people.”
The one thing they all have in common is that they muzzled the free press and any opposing opinions to their elitist socialist programs. They could not have gained power unless the press was either muzzled or they had enough sycophants in their camp to spin their dialect.
The York Times economic columnist Paul Krugman on Tuesday said it was
Quite shockingly, the Nobel laureate took to his blog to complain that the news media are being too fair and balanced in their coverage of this highly contentious issue:
“Watching our system deal with the debt ceiling crisis — a wholly self-inflicted crisis, which may nonetheless have disastrous consequences — it’s increasingly obvious that what we’re looking at is the destructive influence of a cult that has really poisoned our political system.
And no, I don’t mean the fanaticism of the right. Well, OK, that too. But my feeling about those people is that they are what they are; you might as well denounce wolves for being carnivores. Crazy is what they do and what they are.
No, the cult that I see as reflecting a true moral failure is the cult of balance, of centrism.”
Wow! Balance and centrism is a "true moral failure":
“So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent — because news reports always do that.”
In Krugman’s elitist view we, the people are to stupid to understand the complexities of our national debt and budgets. Only “educated” folks like Krugman should be listened to:
“The reality, of course, is that we already have a centrist president — actually a moderate conservative president. Once again, health reform — his only major change to government — was modeled on Republican plans, indeed plans coming from the Heritage Foundation. And everything else — including the wrongheaded emphasis on austerity in the face of high unemployment — is according to the conservative playbook.
What all this means is that there is no penalty for extremism; no way for most voters, who get their information on the fly rather than doing careful study of the issues, to understand what’s really going on.
You have to ask, what would it take for these news organizations and pundits to actually break with the convention that both sides are equally at fault? This is the clearest, starkest situation one can imagine short of civil war. If this won’t do it, nothing will.”
I'm not sure what news reports Krugman has been watching, but the ones I’ve been monitoring at concerning this matter, including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Krugman’s own New York Times, have been anything but balanced.
The take for weeks has been that taxes must be raised to solve this problem and that it is the Republicans — and, in particular, Tea Party freshmen in the House — that are refusing to "compromise."
A new Media Research Center study on this issue found that ABC, CBS, and NBC have consistently cast the GOP as the villains in this debate: (You can download the PDF version by clicking here)
“On Election Day 2010, then-CBS Early Show anchor Harry Smith posed a hypothetical question about newly-elected Republicans to Ann Coulter: “There’ll be a routine vote, for instance, to increase the debt ceiling and the Tea Party guys are going to say, ‘Over my dead body,’ and the government comes to a screeching halt. Then what happens?” The conservative author confidently predicted: “Well, the media will blame the Republicans.”
And that’s precisely what has occurred. A Media Research Center
study of the Big Three network evening and morning programs finds that, when it came to assigning blame for lack of a debt ceiling resolution, ABC, CBS and NBC’s coverage has placed the overwhelming majority of the blame on Republicans’ doorstep.
MRC analysts watched all 202 stories on the debt ceiling from July 1 through July 22, looking for statements which assigned blame or responsibility for the failure to reach a settlement. Of the 85 stories that included such statements, the skew was lopsidedly anti-Republican, with 56 stories (66%) mainly assigning them the blame for the impasse. Even though Democrats control both the Senate and the White House, only 17 network stories (20%) suggested they bore more responsibility, a greater than three-to-one disparity (see chart at right). Twelve stories offered a balanced discussion of which party ought to be blamed.”
But Krugman in his strange world doesn't see it that way:
“What all this means is that there is no penalty for extremism; no way for most voters, who get their information on the fly rather than doing careful study of the issues, to understand what’s really going on. And yes, I think this is a moral issue.”
So, in Krugman's view, it has become a "moral issue" for the news media to only report the side he agrees with. To solve this, he is advocating the press censor reports attempting to present the view from the right. And he works for one of the largest newspapers in the country.
As viewer of numerous news and opinion shows and reader of various Internet news sites and blogs I can tell you that only the Fox News Channel presents a balanced debate on the debt ceiling issue. They consistently bring conservatives, liberals and Tea Partiers to present their side of the issue. Most of the time the liberals can only present spin and talking points while, in my opinion the true conservatives put forth facts. As John Adams said during his defense of the British soldiers accused of murder in the Boston Massacre; “facts are stubborn things.”
Progressive liberals like Krugman do not care about facts. They care about ideology and social justice. Due to their academic pedigree they can’t tolerate contrary opinions to their closely held beliefs. They are like professors who will beat you over the head with their academic status and brilliance, but as a mentor of mine told me years ago; “Your academic pedigree does not outweigh the validity of my argument.” Or to quote Marcus Tullius Cicero; “Rational ability without education has oftener raised man to glory and virtue, than education without natural ability.”
Over the years there have been “brilliant” academics that believed the earth was flat, an iron ball would fall faster than a feather and the sun and planets revolved about the earth. When I study physics in 1955 we used a text book written by “brilliant” academics in the 1940s that stated the atom was the smallest element in the universe. Of course Hiroshima and Nagasaki had not happened at the time the book was written.
There is a common perception in the media today that goes like this. If you are a conservative with a university education your academic pedigree is securitized (Sarah Palin). If you are a conservative without a university education you are just dumb. If you are a liberal with a University pedigree you are brilliant (Barack Obama) and if you are a liberal without an university pedigree you are an artists or an activist.
Progressive left-wing liberals like Krugman and his sycophantic followers just can’t tolerate any opinion other than the ones they cling to. They want those other “diverse and contrary” views silenced because they believe those opinions muddy the waters they are swimming in. They want everyone to march in lockstep to their ideology and woe to you if you don’t.
Well I certainly will not but Krugman’s pontifications. In fact I rarely read the New York Times. Liberal commentator and Fox News contributor Bob Beckel (a person I rarely, if ever, agree with) claimed he did not read the New York Times and quipped on the new FNC panel show, The Five, when the subject of Obama’s recent speech at the University of Maryland in which he talked about the increasingly “splintered” media with Democrats only getting their news from The New York Times and MSNBC while Republicans use Fox News and editorials in the Wall Street Journal came up. While these aren’t exactly new comments from the President, the panelists read much into them and had a lot of issues. Bob Beckel’s were probably the most entertaining. His problem? No one watches MSNBC.
While Greg Gutfeld and Dana Perino speculated that the statement was a veiled attack on Fox News, guest host Andrew Napolitano thought Obama was excusing his own failings and Andrea Tantaros contributed by claiming she uses the New York Times for toilet paper (ouch), Beckel went right for MSNBC:
“First of all, the President also ought to know, when he talks about that, I don’t know of six people that watch MSNBC. I don’t want to pick on a rival but they’re not a rival. They’re like a kindergartner playing baseball against the Yankees.”
If Krugman watched this show (which I doubt he did) he would have gone ballistic. Oh my God, no one watches the left-wing MSNBC and uses my paper as toilet paper. No wonder he wants censorship. How dare these right-wing fascists cast dispersions on the views of the left? In Krugman’s view he is in the tower and we, conservatives, belong in the dungeon. Krugman would have given Goebbels run for his job.
It's getting really scary out there, folks. When the pinhead, pimple on the ass of the world Krugman reaches the intellectual of Hazlitt, Hayek, von Mises or Friedman I might give his some respect, but until then he is someone to simply ignore. So he was given the Nobel Prize, but so were Jimmy Carter and Barack Hussein Obama.
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