Oh that liberal media........
<font size=4><font color=blue>....As long ago as last December, the press was laughing at John Kerry and his chances to win the nomination. Now, they seem deeply offended that President Bush has even decided to run for re-election. Where it gets really weird is to watch the same people who were deriding Kerry just a year ago, now are willing to "go to the mattesses" for him.....
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The Grand Unified Theory Of Vietnam
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Varifrank blog
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Noah Cross : You may think you know what you're dealing with, but, believe me, you don't.
[Jake grins.]
Noah Cross : Why is that funny?
Jake Gittes : That's what the District Attorney used to tell me in Chinatown.
Something has been bugging me about the whole <font color=blue>"John Kerry in Vietnam"<font color=black> thing. I haven't been able to understand the whole anger thing in the press. I can understand Al Gore being angry, I can understand Terry Mcauliffe being angry,the voters of Florida, but the press? That doesn't make sense, what's their dog in this fight? They get a story no matter what happens. <font color=green>Now, I know the press wants a Democrat in office, because, well that's just how the press thinks.<font color=black> Many people in the press are there because of their own spoken desire to "help the helpless, give hope to the hopeless, so on and so forth, and that just lines up with the pamphletts handed out by the Democrat party like the folds in the back of an issue of Mad magazine. <font color=green>The press has always wanted Democrats in office, that's nothing new. What is new is the way that they've gone completely batty in this election, and out of all possible poeple, it's for this guy.<font color=black>
It's not like John Kerry hasn't tried to run for President before, and got nowhere, not even out of the early democrat primaries. He's been <font color=blue>"unwept, unhonoured, and unsung"<font color=black> for some time, and he's a not exactly a stunning member of the Senate, he barely makes any kind of presence.
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Example? Name one piece of legislature with his name on it? What comittee does he sit on? Remember any speech of his, ever? Biden? can't get that guy to shut up, Bob Dole, He's still talking, and he hasn't been in office for 8 years. But Kerry? He's been a cypher for years.
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As long ago as last December, the press was laughing at John Kerry and his chances to win the nomination. Now, they seem deeply offended that President Bush has even decided to run for re-election. Where it gets really weird is to watch the same people who were deriding Kerry just a year ago, now are willing to <font color=blue>"go to the mattesses"<font color=black> for him. So what's the deal with the press and John Kerry?
What makes a nice guy like Chris Matthews want to jump across the table and verbally assault a woman on nationwide TV, just because she disagrees with him? What makes newspaper after newspaper assault anyone who even dares say something negative about John Kerry? Thousands of man hours have been spent <font color=blue>"uncovering the truth"<font color=black> about President Bush and his time in the Texas Air Guard, but <font color=blue>the only time spent on the Kerry-vietnam story is to dig up information on the people who are standing against Kerry. No one in the press has spent more than a glancing look at Kerrys actual record.<font color=black> If there was the slightest hint that Bush had done what Kerry has most clearly done with his record, we would be talking about President Cheneys chances for Re-election right now.
There has to be something more here than just simple <font color=blue>"media bias"<font color=green>. I can make a pretty easy to prove case that at this point that the press is no longer objective in this election. I think that's easily proveable. I think that is what is different this time than in elections of the past, where it was clear that the press had a bias, but they still did their job, it took some nudging, but during Clintons years they did report on Jennifer Flowers, and the whitewater scandal eventually, If such a thing were to happen in the Kerry administration, I seriously doubt it.
But look at what we have going on now. At Borders Books there are three rows stacked 14 feet high of <font color=blue>"Bush is the devil incarnate!"<font color=green> books thats a LOT of publishing companies making the decision to print these books. That's alot of people giving the <font color=blue>"OK"<font color=green> to have contracts with authors signed, printed, shipped and so on. For Geroge Bush? Really? does he really deserve that kind of anger and hate? Anger is a passion on a par equal with love, you should be suspicious of the source when either emotion makes its appearance.
I sat back and I thought about it. I then spent some time looking up various things on the internet. After looking around on the web, I came across a set of pictures of John Kerry at the 1970 <font color=blue>"Valley Forge"<font color=green> rally, known as <font color=blue>"Winter Soldier"<font color=green>, where Kerry made some pretty rough statements about the soldiers and sailors he has just finished serving with. Behind him in the picture was the usual suspects, but then I began to pick out a series of celebrities, who at that time were just new and up and coming in their careers. While I was doing this, I had a documentary on the TV :<font color=blue>" A Decade Under The Influence".<font color=green> This is the story of the rise of the new breed in Hollywood after the studio system ended. Many of the people in the background of the pictures with Kerry were dead center in this documentary. I was doing digital convergence and I didnt even know it.
And then it hit me.
Vietnam is where the generation that makes up the majority of the press and media decision makers <font color=blue>"made its bones"<font color=green>. Vietnam established a moral order for that generation, It also was their test of personal validation. You could not be part of the <font color=blue>"new order"<font color=green> if you were for the Vietnam war or even the soldiers who fought in it. You could not be a part of the new order if you felt in any way patriotic towards the US, or even favorable to the American culture. How could you back this country after John F. Kennedy , Robert F. Kennedy, Dr. King, Malcom X and so many others were clearly killed and men like Nixon went on living?
Clinton came along at a unique time in history. Had there still been a cold war in 1992, I seriously doubt that Clinton could have ever been a serious contender, but the best way to tell when the Cold War was over, is when for the first time we did not measure our President against the test of <font color=red>"the button"<font color=green>. We all used to do it, and it went something like this: <font color=red>" Is this guy someone who you want next to the nuclear button every day"<font color=green>. Clinton is the first time we were able to say, <font color=blue>"eh, thats not going to happen anymore, so what the hell". <font color=green>
However, the press and media world reacted to the election of Clinton as if it were the liberation of France in 1944, and to people of that <font color=blue>"moral order"<font color=green>, it must've seemed like it was.
When Bush was elected in 2000, it came as such a shock and surprise that there were so many people in the United States who didnt want to vote for Al Gore, that it must've seemed like it was a stolen election. What else could it be, no thinking person would actually vote for George W. Bush, can you believe the man actually said that Jesus Christ was the most important intellectual he had ever read? with a straight face! does he think thats going to get him votes?
I think that would have caused the press to look askance at George W. Bush for the last four years, but I dont think it alone was enough friction to generate all this heat.
And then something happened that no one expected or foresaw.
For the first time since December 7th, an outside force attacked and killed Americans at home. Only this time, it wasn't an obscure military base in the Pacific, but Manhattan. Liberal, Libertine, New Yorker Magazine, If you lived here, you'd be home by now, Manhattan.
For the first time, the generation that had rejected war as only a tool of the oppressor, largely used as a club by American business to subjugate poor countries was faced with an enemy that didnt distinguish between the military and civilians, Marines or little girls on their way to disneyland or even the enlightened masses of Mahattan. They wanted to kill us all, left and right, progressives, liberals, men, women, it makes no difference to them, submit to islam, or die. <font color=red>That is the only choice the Jihadis have given us. <font color=blue>That wasn't something the people who subscribed to the "Grand Unified Theory Of Vietnam" ever considered in their dogma. Kill us? why? We didnt vote for George W. Bush, They should have attacked Texas!<font color=green>
This act violence and insanity by the Jihadis shook the entire world to the core, but no group more so than those of this new moral order whos rules were established by their views on Vietnam. <font color=blue>"Why do they hate us"<font color=green> they said. <font color=blue>"It must be our policies"<font color=green> they said, <font color=blue>"See! this is the reaction to globalization". This war thing makes no sense, Europeans live with terror, so why can't we, why - its just a pretense for the consolidation of power, THATS IT!..... <font color=green>
The other thing that bothered them was all the flag waving. To that generation, the US flag was exactly equivalent to the Nazi swastika and was waved by exactly the same people. I dont think I've ever seen a Volvo with an American Flag stuck to it, putting a flag on your car, unless its for some other country as if to proclain <font color=blue>"I've been there-have you?"<font color=green>, is the only way its done in some neighborhoods.
September 11th caused that generation to confront some truths that they didnt want to confront in their well ordered world. The moral certainty that opposition to Vietnam had provided was pulled away leaving them naked and vulnerable and exposed to something that they could not, nor would not accept.
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Those ignorant people, whom Gerge W. Bush is just but one example, might be right.
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This-cannot-stand.
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If George W. Bush is right about the defense of America and the defense of liberty, then they have been wrong about a great many things for many years.
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So, why is the press unhinged and supporting John F. Kerry like crazed moonies?
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It's for the redemption from their sins and the return of a moral order that they can understand, more importanly a moral order on which they sit at the top.
By actively working to elect John Kerry, they can return to the world where Vietnam was wrong, but they can now say that defense of America is right. By working to elect John Kerry, they do not have to confront their bigotry against their very own country and its countrymen. By voting for John Kerry, they can tell their friends abroad that they need not fear us anymore, that the knuckle dragging republicans have been removed from the levers of power, and the <font color=blue>"men of breeding and refinement"<font color=green> have returned.
More simply put, by electing John Kerry it let's a generation off the hook for its malfeasance in the defense of liberty.
Evelyn Mulwray : What were you doing in Chinatown?
Jake Gittes : Working for the District Attorney.
Evelyn Mulwray : Doing what?
Jake Gittes : As little as possible.
Evelyn Mulwray : The District Attorney gives his men advice like that?
Jake Gittes : They do in Chinatown.
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