It’s no revelation at this point that Americans have lost and are continuing to lose trust in institutions, journalism in particular. These institutions were always a good deal less than perfect, but at least they didn’t smell so bad you had to leave the room.
I logged on to the computer this morning, and within minutes I had to take my nose elsewhere. I admit the following account might seem like a rant, but I hope at least it’s a rant with a lesson.
First off, I see this thing from the NYT — the country’s paper of record, let’s remember — ever-so-subtley titled, “America’s Monster”. The subhead is, “How the U.S. Backed Kidnapping, Torture and Murder in Afghanistan.”
I’ll just give you the start so you can see what I mean without having your digestion turn into a disaster:
The convoy rumbled into the Taliban heartland, a white desert littered with stones. Over the loudspeakers at the local mosque, the Afghan police officers ordered everyone to gather: The commander was here.
Dozens assembled in the mud square to listen as Abdul Raziq, one of America’s most important partners in the war against the Taliban, stood before the crowd, gesturing at two prisoners he had brought along to make his point.
The prisoners knelt with their hands bound as Raziq spoke to his men. A pair of his officers raised their rifles and opened fire, sending the prisoners into spasms on the reddening earth. In the silence that followed, Raziq addressed the crowd, three witnesses said.
“You will learn to respect me and reject the Taliban,” Raziq said after the killings, which took place in the winter of 2010, according to the witnesses and relatives of both men. “Because I will come back and do this again and again, and no one is going to stop me.”
For years, American military leaders lionized Raziq as a model partner in Afghanistan, their “if only” ally in the battle against the Taliban: If only everyone fought like Raziq, we might actually win this war, American commanders often said.
Note the similarity of the described conduct years ago in Afghanistan to what Hamas did in Israel on October 7 — similarity minus the hostage-taking, rapes, bashing in of infants’ heads, mutilation, gouged out eyes, burned-to-a-crisp limbs and lots more — things to which the Times has given occasional coverage but that have now largely disappeared in favor of nonstop stories about Hamas Palestinian suffering.
Has anyone seen NYT (or any MSM) coverage — much less coverage in extensive, lurid detail — of the ongoing captivity and brutalization of the scores of American and Israeli hostages, or at least the ones who haven't yet been tortured or starved to death? Surely some determined, investigative journalism could find a way to get that story, no?
If journalism were the point, sure. But it’s not. The point here is the same it always is with the people just below the surface in running, not just what remains of journalism, but higher “education” and huge swaths of the current administration. These thousand-decibel stories about years-ago abuse at the hands of America, trotted out as today’s headline fare — all while putting on the back burner the current, grotesque treatment of our own citizens — are brought to you by exactly the people and exactly the mindset that writes books for your fourth grader in which George Washington’s main attribute is that he was an “enslaver.”
The Left’s hatred for America is nothing if not comprehensive.
[UPDATE: I neglected to mention the first time around that the NYT’s story nowhere contains a comparison of Afghan citizens’ treatment after the US left and the Taliban took over with their treatment while the US was still there — that comparison being indispensible to any fair-minded or even reasonably serious account].
OK, so enough with the Afghanistan story. I turn the electronic page hoping to find something less thoroughly disgusted with the country (and thinking to myself, “How hard can that be?), and this is what shows up:
In the 24 hours after the unexpected death of the Islamic Republic’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, the following things happened: the BBC published a headline about his “mixed legacy,” the UN flew its flag at half-staff to honor him, and the U.S. Senate chaplain offered a prayer for him on the Senate floor.
Well golly, maybe turning that particular page wasn’t such a hot idea. Let’s go to the next one to see what the Washington Post has to say. And sure enough, there we find the Left’s version of “balance,” to wit, three essays opposed to the ICC’s plan to arrest the Prime Minister of Israel and three essays cheering it on. Among the latter was this, which appeared without editorial comment by the Post:
The Biden administration’s reasons for condemning the International Criminal Court’s move against Israel and Hamas are confounding. It appears to be grasping for a way to defend senior Israeli officials for their starvation strategy in Gaza — a strategy that senior U.S. officials themselves have repeatedly decried.
President Biden called chief prosecutor Karim Khan’s request for arrest warrants for senior Israeli officials “outrageous,” noting that “there is no equivalence — none — between Israel and Hamas.” But Khan did not say there was equivalence; he simply charged both sides for their separate crimes.
I don’t know whether the most apt thing to say here is (1) that ninth grade is where you learn it’s bad form simply to assume your conclusion, or (2) that saying quite this boldly that “equivalence is not equivalence” would be enough to make Goebbels blush.
It seems that my page-turning efforts aren’t working out too well. Somewhere in the last couple of days, there’s got to be something to renew my faith in the people and institutions that hold so much power over us.
Maybe I should try medical science!
What I find is this in the Federalist, titled, “Covid ‘Expert’ Francis Collins Finally Admits There Was No Science For Six-Foot Social Distancing.”
In the Covid soap opera, the lockdowners, the “follow the science” preachers, took years from our lives on a foundation of bad science. Some of us knew that while we were in the throes of the endless Covid Red Alert; the rest are learning it these days from the same [people] who ran the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
To those who might think I’m an anti-vaxer, I’m not. Anything but: I had seven doses of it and three doses of monoclonal antibodies. I’m the opposite of an anti-vaxer. But I still get to be curious about the scientific anchor and the truthfulness of what I and the rest of us were being told, both about vaccines and the supposed need for “social distancing.”
Testifying earlier this year in a closed-door interview before the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, a transcript of which was released this week, former NIH Director Francis Collins confessed that the government’s sweeping social-distancing guidance wasn’t backed by the science we were all supposed to be following.
“The six feet of separation recommendation had real life consequences. This guideline made it nearly impossible for schools nationwide to re-open due to the pressure from teachers unions to follow this guideline. In addition, businesses had to adapt at great cost or risk complete closure,” states a Thursday subcommittee staff memo on the Collins interview.
But the government-imposed individual internment camps were all worth it, right? Social distancing, plus deeply flawed vaccines, prevented 800,000 deaths, headlines last week proclaimed. But when asked whether he believed any science or evidence supported the six-feet rule, Collins said he did not.
“Is that I do not recall or I do not see any evidence supporting six feet?” a Covid subcommittee staff member asked the good doctor.
“I did not see evidence, but I’m not sure I would have been shown evidence at that point,” Collins replied.
But what about four years later?
“Since then, it has been an awfully large topic. Have you seen any evidence since then supporting six feet?” the staffer asked.
“No,” the former NIH director conceded.
My search, at least for the moment, to try to rescue my own ebbing faith in our institutions just isn’t working out too well. Phooey. Being ever hopeful, however, perhaps I’ll resume tomorrow with some stories about the judicial system, in particular about Judge Marchan’s even temperament and impartiality.
Oh………………………….wait……………………………………………………………..
Oh, my! My friend Bill, on whose sober perspicacity I rely lest my world view grow giddy, actually seems to understate the problem. Now this may be because of the clever and economical conceit if restricting his review to a single day, and even then stopping at the moment when nausea threatened to become sharing! Thus forgivable, even charitable.
But it really is worse. They lie all the time. They lie by preference. They lie not only out of desperation but sheer habit. They lie as if truth were the course never considered, as if their choice were not between the truth and a lie, but amongst lies, as if the question "what shall we say?" makes no glancing tangent with the truth.
Moreover, once one realizes this and applies the framework of 'they always lie' retroactively as far back as one can find evidence, it becomes clear that "they" is a very large group, and a very long-lived one, comprising essentially the entire political/media establishment.
Whatever one might say against the populists, there is this in their defense: They do not join in the collective lie. They may lie on their own behalf. Nixon lied about Watergate. Reagan surely did lie when caught out in that very funny Polish/Italian joke about the duck at the cock fight. Trump lies personally all the time.
But the reason they are hated is that they do not endorse the collective lie, nor practice the idea that leadership comes down to the crafting of lies, as nearly all mainstream Republicans do so enthusiastically.
Given his hawkish reputation it might have seemed surprising that Reagan never took us to war, except in Grenada. This was not only because he was of a kindly and pacific nature, though he was. Mostly it was because he denied to himself the essential weapon of the war monger: the lie. Every U.S. war in my lifetime--I was born in 1956--was justified in the first case by a lie and then lies upon lies to follow.
Grenada--about which I wrote my first book--required no lies because it was all so obvious. (The President, in a letter thanking me for the book, did point out that I had gotten something wrong, as a result of being misled by his senior staff. In his letter he wrote "you are entitled to know the truth", and told it!)
For shame, "Bush lied, kids died" is true. None of these people can be trusted, they lie to spend the lives they are sworn to protect and serve. They are lying us into a war with China right now. Russia is amazingly wicked and Ukraine deserving, but they lied us into Ukraine and they have never stopped since.
Like you, I am no anti-vaxxer. Vulnerable by both age and medical condition, every time I saw a pretty lady in white with a needle in her hand I rolled up my sleeve and looked longingly. But the post-Covid excess death count may be headed toward the millions, led by previously rare cancers, and the vaccine appears to be implicated in a statistically significant way
Years and years ago, in preparation for a talk, I looked up the precise wording of John 8:44. Thank goodness for Google and "fuzzy logic" because I had gotten the key phrase wrong. I my memory Jesus said of Satan "he was a liar from the beginning." The actual wording is more devastating:
"He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him."
Not merely a "liar" from the beginning but a "murderer" from the beginning because the lie makes the murder. Death, scripture says, came into the world because of the lies Satan told in the Garden.
They lie and lie and so they kill and kill. By comparison Nixon, Reagan, and Trump, the fathers and Godfathers of GOP populism, in their innocence shine white as snow. It has not been easy, but I think I know how I am going to vote.
Thank you.
Your devoted friend,
RV
Mainstream media is as if not more resposible for American's loss of trust in institutions as the institutions themselves. It isn't even close. The NY Times has squandered a reputation that goes back to the Civil War to literally become a propoganda rag for whatever anti-Western cause of the moment is in vogue. As always it starts with Israel (And Orthodox Jews) who have been libeled by the Timnes for decades. But it doesn't end there. The Washington Post may be worse.