This is the lesson to learn from all of this, if you haven’t learned it already
I think of the Covington story and the Buzzfeed Cohen/Trump story as connected, even though their subject matters differ tremendously. The common meta-subject-matter of both, the lessons to learn from both, go like this:
(1) There is no limit to the degree to which the media will lie in order to hurt the right.
(2) It can start with a fringe-type of media source (usually reporting on something manufactured and/or distorted by a leftist activist unidentified as such in the report). Then the supposedly more reliable media, the MSM, will quickly pick up and run with it, with what you might call reckless disregard for the truth. This is not carelessness or accidental at all.
(3) If an exposure of the falsehood occurs and the truth finally comes out through some other conduit, there will be minimal or no apology or retraction from the original source or from the MSM. They will either double down or issue a fake and/or inadequate “apology,” often “apologizing” for some minor element they got wrong and leaving the thrust of the story and their errors intact.
(4) In the minds of most MSM readers and listeners, the story will therefore stand mostly as originally reported. Most readers probably won’t even catch any corrections that are issued, and the ones who do will either reject them or consider them of minimal import.
(5) Then without breaking stride, the MSM will go on to the next episode of the same game—because it works for them.
I finally noticed and comprehended this game about two years post-9/11—a process I’ve described in my “a mind is a difficult thing to change” series—and this was one of the main reasons for my political change.
The tactic is even more blatantly obvious now. But many people who self-describe as being on the right seem to remain blind to it. That’s one of the themes of this recent post of Ace’s, in which he quotes a Twitter user named davereaboi as writing the following (the “you” here is the supposedly conservative press):
People are furious that those of you who bought into it and couldn’t resist making knee-jerk Virtue Signaling condemnations have not yet learned about the nature of the enemy we’re fighting:
Activists are trained to set up these scenarios, the media runs with stories that are too good to check because they reinforce their biases. They do this on purpose. You just have to read Lefty activist literature. It’s all there, for decades. *Not knowing is your failure.*
That is the heart of the matter. How can intelligent people have been taken in by this? I really don’t know. It’s not just that they’re in the Beltway, or interested in virtue-signaling, although those things are part of it. At this point they seem incredibly stupid and destructive, or else only pretending to believe in what they say they believe.
At least if their apologies sounded sincere and complete I might give them the benefit of the doubt, even now. We all make mistakes. But to act this way over and over and over, with so little remorse and seemingly no learning at all, from people who are inclined to think themselves superior to the rest of us? No. Fools or knaves or both, take your pick.
That is why so much of the right’s ire in response to the Covington story has been directed at pundits supposedly on the right who fell for the lie. It’s sort of like an error in baseball, or an own-goal in soccer. Doesn’t that make fans much angrier than when the other team scores? We know what game the left plays. Why don’t all writers on the right know it, too?
Ace is suggesting that some of those “on the right” aren’t really conservative thinkers. They’ve surrendered to the leftist environments in which they live and operate, and/or they hate Trump’s style so much that the sight of one of his campaign hats, even on a minor, is enough to unhinge them.
That brilliantly sums up the whole problem.
Fools or knaves. WE ARE THE FOOLS. WHY? B/C we have been intimidated by Political Correctness for years with no push back on our part. Now, look at the mess we are in. It is way past time to fight back if we are going to have any chance to take our country back.
We need to work individually and together. Let’s get some ideas going.
‘m shocked. The Walter Duranty/Jason Blair school of Dan Rather journalism would lie to me?
Stunning news.
If, I hadn’t served in the Navy for twenty years.
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/11/opinion/the-news-we-kept-to-ourselves.html
I knew CNN was lying to me throughout the last decade of the 20th century. And they kept lying to me, and about me, into the 21st.
“Linda Foley, head of the Newspaper Guild, the labor union for journalists which claims 30,000 members, has been resurrecting the Eason Jordan claim that U.S. Soldiers deliberately target journalists. I wonder if she will claim that assasination of a journalist was the work of a U.S. Soldier masquerading as a car bomber?”
You need to know this. Air launched munitions cost money. Artillery rounds are expensive. Bullets are cheap. I don’t know how little they cost, as even the Navy which isn’t an infantry force buys in bulk.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/US_Navy_090224-N-4929F-078_Navy_Region_Southwest_Harbor_Security_patrols_the_San_Diego_harbor.jpg
I probably managed the largest ammunition account of any intel command in the Pacific Fleet.
Which isn’t saying a lot.
But here’s the dealio, daddio. I wouldn’t waste not even one fraction of a penny, if that’s what it costs, on a so called journalist. It’s not worth it.
https://news.usni.org/2019/01/08/navy-quietly-fires-20-hyper-velocity-projectiles-destroyers-deckgun
Well, I doubt it was quiet.
But still, $75 to $100 k per round ain’t pocket change.
It’s a cheaper way to put a round across the bow than a missile, though. The Navy learned this back in the seventies. Oddly, but perhaps not, when the Nav was going to all-missile frigates they discovered they needed guns.
Because they want it to be true?
KRB
I hope you are not mistaking me. I have never wished something to be true that wasn’t.
R.R. Reno, the editor of First Things, has written about this, focusing on the condemnation of the kids by their school and the local bishop, and says they’re “anxious — too often about themselves and their reputations, not those under their care. They’re beholden to fears that they, too, will be accused of racism. So the rush to defend themselves and their institutions — at the cost of the reputations and wellbeing of the very people they claim to serve.”
The Covington school cease reminds me of the video I saw during the Kavanaugh hearing. Two guys were waiting in line and saw someone paying the demonstrators who got through out of the hearing room. I never heard who he was but there he was on video.
This thing was a setup from the start,. I would like to know who was giving the kids those MAGA hats to set the scene./Then the goofy old homeless “Indian” moved in.
I think the pundits on the right that have earned the opprobrium of people that actually uphold conservative values are more concerned with their reputation and jobs, keeping the door open in the limited sphere of media positions than actual principles. Plain and simple, they lack courage and conviction.
Steve57,
No, I am not talking about you.
Ann,
That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Thank you.
KRB
Steve57:
Sounds like a fin stabilized/guided discarding sabot round for the deck guns.
BTW, if you’re in Texas and someone tells you he’s a SEAL likely as not he’s full of you know what. Now that Chris Kyle has been killed there are like two retired SEALs in Texas. Your odds of meeting any SEAL retired, dead, or living in any state is next to zero.
Luttrell brothers. And Texas is a big state.
My esteem for “National Review” has taken a big hit.
om, you could be right.
Kae, should I be happy that you are not thinking about me.
Neo: off-topic, when I hit my bookmark for your site, I’m not seeing a hyperlink below your comment, “Please click the link below for Amazon purchases through neo”. No link … didn’t stop to check the page coding to see the problem as I figured you’re paying for that service.
Onward, clc
Carlosincalifornia:
Thanks, but if you have adblocker on you probably wouldn’t see it. Do you have adblocker?
MSM (SSM Soviet Style Media):
You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you.
There will be a reckoning.
“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you.”
For now. Just wait until you get taken to task for not being enthusiastic enough about spouting the party line on social media.
From the “First Things” article by R.R. Reno which Ann linked above:
Now we seem to have a Church in which kids who go to parochial schools aren’t protected. Their school principals and bishops prefer to condemn them rather than defend them. If there’s the slightest risk of getting sideways with establishment opinion, they’re thrown under the bus.
Nothing new to this Catholic boy who attended parochial school in the sixties. The RCC looks out for its authority above all else.
However, according to this article, parents are pushing back against the Church and Bishop Foys:
“Covington Catholic Parents Demand Apology From Church, Won’t Let Kids Be Confirmed”
The Diocese’s most recent statement merely notes that the school would be closed on January 22 due to the potentially violent protests erupting at the institution. Thus far, Bishop Foys and the Diocese of Covington have been completely unwilling to admit they may have been incorrect, and say they will release no further statements until a “third party investigation” has been conducted into the actions of the students.
https://bigleaguepolitics.com/covington-catholic-parents-demand-apology-from-church-wont-let-kids-be-confirmed/
I await the Bishop’s response with interest.
Yes, there is certainly a familiar pattern. Several of the non-professional media types were immediately skeptical while our professional political pundit class bought it. There was a lot of digging by independent journalists, such as Casandra Fairbanks, Mike Cernovich and Nick Tomasheski (https://twitter.com/nickmon1112), who are all still doing real-time fact checks as the social media smears continue.
Think this can be explained by Peggy Noonan’s column on the protected vs. the unprotected. Established media like the Weekly Standard, NR and Hugh Hewitt enjoy a certain amount of protection within their clique (they cover for each other, as seen with Kevin Williamson) and enjoy at least some professional courtesy from their media counterparts provided they don’t stick their necks out for the really icky people like Trump. The independent (and in some cases, non-credentialed) journalists like Fairbanks, Cernovich, Tomasheski et all are far more vulnerable. They’ve seen how easily a non-progressive voice can be snuffed out by social media and payment processers via the deplatforming mob. They’re stepping in and protecting these Covington Catholic kids because they are all too familiar with the mob’s tactics, and they know tomorrow it may be them being targeted. Frankovich can quietly pull his post and let his colleagues cover for him with no fear of losing his job; an independent journalist can have his/her entire career aborted by twitter/facebook/youtube/paypal/patreon at the whim of a few activist cranks.
Steve57: my experience has been that everyone is either a Seal or has worked on the SR-71
Michael; Steve57:
They all took time off to go to Woodstock, though.
I was the only member of my generation who managed to miss Woodstock.
neo on January 22, 2019 at 11:45 pm at 11:45 pm said:
I was the only member of my generation who managed to miss Woodstock.
* * *
Must have been you that AesopSpouse and I saw at the mall, ’cause we didn’t go either.
I *did* actually go to Woodstock. I even still have the tickets I bought like a dummy.
Lizzy – I didn’t read all of Nick’s tweets because I hate the Twitter format, especially the reverse chronology, but he & another person in that thread said a couple of good things that fit with Neo’s lesson plan here:
“I’ll make this easier for you.
1.) fact check
BEFORE
2.) Political demagoguery
People seem to really like that sort of thing. I suggest implementing it into your media outlet’s routine”
“More Jack Posobiec ?? Retweeted Abby Ohlheiser
The additional videos were available online well before any of the articles were written Saturday
Reporters didn’t bother to look
We did”
I didn’t go to Woodstock and none of my hippie friends went either. I’ve never met anyone who even claimed to attend. This Woodstock “stolen valor” thing strikes me as a trope for people who don’t like hippies.
Which provides an interesting sidelight to the confirmation bias of people who hate red MAGA hats and those who wear them in the current discussions.
Checking the web all I find is this bit vague bit from “Yahoo Answers” (a source I usually ignore if I happen to click it):
How many people REALLY attended Woodstock verse how many say they attended?
I’m guessing 1/2 million really attended and 5 million say they attended.
https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100103150125AAz0gbH
FOAF on January 23, 2019 at 12:25 am at 12:25 am said:
I *did* actually go to Woodstock. I even still have the tickets I bought like a dummy.
* * *
Actual paper tickets might actually be worth something.
Have you checked on eBay?
How WAS the festival, anyway? Does it look better, or worse, in long-range hindsight? Just curious.
Most of what I’ve read made me glad I didn’t go (wasn’t interested and — full disclosure — didn’t even know it was happening at the time; small-town-in-Texas was a long way from the action, and I didn’t like most bands of the era anyway).
The little bit Neo quoted from Ace’s post is just the tip of the iceberg; all of davereaboi’s points are totally on target.
Also, Ace’s entire output since Saturday seems to be lashing out at the people who jumped on the dog-pile without waiting for any credible evidence against the boys.
Good reading if you want to stoke your own outrage.
For instance,
http://acecomments.mu.nu/?post=379322
“Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson Have Had It With the Cucks
…
How many times can they keep saying “I didn’t know”? Seems like we’re up to a hundred times, at least, of this unteachable crew being taught a lesson and yet continuing to be unschooled.
As Limbaugh says: They’re getting “fooled” because they want to be fooled. They think this stuff is true because they want it to be true.
They eagerly push memes that paint conservative children as evil and racist because in their deepest heart they want conservative children to be evil and racist — that gives them more people to scold and feel good about scolding.
At some point, you don’t get to say “I was fooled” any longer.
At some point, you either have to admit one of two things is true:
1, you’re not that smart, certainly not as smart as you boast to people on twitter, or else you wouldn’t keep (allegedly) getting chumped and rolled by the left every other week.
2, you’re not conservative. Certainly you feel no kinship with conservatives, as you are always ready (eager, even) to believe the worst about them.
…
You cannot keep claiming you’re a “conservative” while you continue to implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, demonstrate your believe that 60%+ of conservatives are racists needing to be lynched, and that leftwing agitators are swell guys who just want to tell us the truth about these monsters.
And you cannot keep claiming you’re a smart Twitter Addict while trotting out the “I got fooled… AGAIN” for the thousandth time.
The same people who put their noses up at a Project Veritas video had no problem whatsoever with promoting an obviously selectively edited video shit out by an anonymous Twitter account.
The difference? Project Veritas is right wing and this anonymous account is leftwing.
Thus, the soyboy beta cucks obviously sneer at the first as being obvious Rightwing Racist Lies and rush to embrace the latter as obviously Full of Truth.”
This one hits some of the themes Neo has addressed as well.
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/379331.php
“January 22, 2019
By the Way…
You know who brought it to the alleged “conservative” Rich Lowry’s attention that the Covington video was #FakeNews?
It was the proudly left-wing YouTuber Tim Pool.
I’ve linked Tim Pool a lot. He’s left-of-center, but he is full of basic common sense and a spirit of fair play and against race/gender “identitarianism” on both the right and left.
…
It took a leftwing guy (though a fair-minded and sensible one) to actually watch the videos and tell the alleged right-wing guy Rich Lowry that he was pushing a false story and unfairly condemning innocent children who had done literally nothing wrong.
…
If a leftwing guy (eh, kinda leftwing — moderate on policy issues, but he knows the hard left’s playbook) needs to explain to our “rightwing advocates” that they should look at the evidence before convicting children of hate crimes, do we need a rightwing media any more?
…
Should we continue funding failure? What do we expect will come out of our continuing investment in failure?
We asked them to take our concerns to the establishment, to act as our tribunes to the actual decision-makers, so that our concerns would be addressed.
They mostly refused, and mostly delivered the establishment’s concerns to us.
We asked them to take our side against the media’s constant attacks.
They mostly refused. People like David French have a nice little cottage industry going of calling conservatives racists in The Atlantic.
We asked them to score a political victory for us once in a while.
They completely failed. This may be our fault, for wrongly assuming they had any efficacy or influence to begin with.
Now we’re down to the very most minimal request: Please don’t scalp-hunt our children just because Jezebel and the HuffPo are doing it and you don’t want to feel like a left-out Nazi.
That’s what we’re down to. That’s how low we’ve lowered the bar. We’re no longer asking them to do anything positive for us.
We’re just down to begging them not to attack our children because our children are Suspiciously White and Male.
Based on Frankovich’s non-apology, and The Editors’ determination to keep minimizing their role in this lynch mob and blaming the media (but not themselves!) for pushing a false story that put innocent kids’ lives in danger and families in fear — I’m not sure what their answer is here.
…
Tim Pool is not a conservative, but he does know that the hard left — the “identitarian left,” the antifa left– plays dirty and he does not like it.
Tim Pool is worth fifteen cucks from National Review — and he’s actually a left-winger to boot!
That says something.
That says a lot.
If a one-man operation, consisting of one left-of-center commentator, is a better defender of innocently slandered conservative boys and a better critic of leftwing panic-mobs than our alleged right-wing institutions:
What is the point of having these institutions?
…
What cannot be reformed must be destroyed.”
Ace linked to this post by a blogger I am not familiar with, but they are apparently reading from the same page.
https://crayfisher.wordpress.com/2019/01/22/hatcrime/
“Why did the Covington Kids video go viral so quickly? MAGA hats.
The Nazis had swastikas. The KKK had white hoods and burning crosses. But no symbol of hatred is more potent than a red ball cap emblazoned with the vile words “Make America Great Again.”
That is why they must be outlawed.
George Orwell gave us Thoughtcrime and Facecrime. If you combine a thoughtcrime with a violent crime you have a Hate crime. But when you wear a MAGA ball cap on your head you are guilty of hatcrime.
…
We associate the Confederate flag with the Civil War – a bloody, bitter conflict fought over slavery. Democrats tried to secede in order to keep slavery legal. When they lost the Civil War, many of those same Democrats formed the Ku Klux Klan. The KKK’s symbols were the Confederate flag, white pointed hoods, and a burning cross. For 100 years after the Civil War the KKK terrorized and murdered black people throughout the South.
The swastika is the symbol we associate with Nazi Germany. The Nazis not only started the biggest, bloodiest war in human history, but they also murdered millions of innocent people, including 6 million Jews.
MAGA hats, on the other hand, are associated with Donald Trump, a billionaire who lowered our taxes and tweets mean things about the news media. So why do those hats cause such an emotional reaction in Democrats? There are two main reasons:
1. Trump beat Hillary.
2. Democrats are batshit crazy.
There is no objective reason for the MAGA hat to be considered a symbol of hate. But Democrats these days don’t have much connection to objective reality. It’s all about feelings.
Well, now that I have Ace’s blog out of my system, here’s a post that also can be used to tie together the methods of the Left as Neo began with above, although it was probably written before the Covington Crisis emerged.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/01/the_tables_turn_on_pelosi_and_the_media.html
“January 20, 2019
The Tables Turn on Pelosi and the Media
By Clarice Feldman
Saturday was National Popcorn Day, but I’ve been nibbling on popcorn all week as Nancy Pelosi learned a lesson about presidential power and the media was gut checked by the special prosecutor. I haven’t had this much fun since election night 2016.
…
Shortly after this, [Pelosi’s closed-down junket] the flimsy publication BuzzFeed, which earlier had printed now debunked scandalous dossier fabrications, carried a sensational account by two reporters, one of whom was Jason Leopold, a known fabulist.
…
CNN and MSNBC alone made almost 200 references in 12 hours to the BuzzFeed story.
The fun and games were soon over. In an unprecedented move, Special Counsel Mueller’s office said the story was untrue.
Were the press, which peddled this bunk — which they certainly knew was nonsense but failed to anticipate Mueller’s response — chastened? Not really.
Don Surber fisked the after-incident tweets of Washington Post reporter Aaron Blake, tweet-by-tweet, and concluded:
‘OK, now my reply.
The BuzzFeed story was false.
BuzzFeed stories throughout the Trump presidency have been false.
No real journalist would have gone with the story. “According to BuzzFeed” does not let reporters off the hook because they vouched for BuzzFeed by basing stories on its reporting.
Blake needs to apologize. Blake needs to decide if he is a reporter or a pundit. If the former, he needs to keep his opinions to himself, get all sides of the story, and treat them with equal respect.
If he chooses to be a pundit, he needs to use the 24 Hour Rule in commenting on news that makes President Trump look bad because those cigars keep exploding on Blake and all of Trump’s enemies in the press. ‘
…
Just maybe, the extravagant salaries of the big-time news readers can be slashed, the money saved used to hire reporters who can do a better job …”
Yes, the target was Trump (MAGA hats) and the Covington Boys were just the vector of delivery.
Most of what I’ve read made me glad I didn’t go (wasn’t interested and — full disclosure — didn’t even know it was happening at the time; small-town-in-Texas was a long way from the action, and I didn’t like most bands of the era anyway).
AesopFan: I enjoyed Woodstock as a film, but I wouldn’t have wanted to be there. A couple years later I sold my ticket to a huge (for its time) Led Zeppelin concert in Tampa and had no regrets.
I did know people who went to the Atlanta International Pop Festival the month before Woodstock. The temperatures were near 100 and it was a somewhat tough time. My brother had a bum trip there and never took acid again.
Another classic thing straight people get wrong is that hippies took acid all the time and it was a feel-good drug. Wrong on both counts.
An LSD trip is a serious drug experience which takes a lot of energy and can go frightfully wrong. Plus LSD creates a tolerance such that if you take it more than once a week, the effect is minimized.
Most hippies I knew took LSD less than a couple dozen times. Whatever insights it provides — and there are some — it wears you out and is too unpredictable if all you want is to get high.
Neo, I am going to lift a quotation from your linked post about your political views being changed, because I think it is quite appropriate here, and just demonstrates that the battle against deliberate lies by the Enemy is not new:
“A hatred of war can be no reason for being false to ourselves, in the name of an aimless amiability that cries ”˜peace” where there is none.” — F. L. Lucas (1936)
From comments to Neo’s old post:
Ymarsakar on September 26, 2015 at 10:18 pm at 10:18 pm said:
The Left’s structure was already apparent in 2007, before Hussein got on the national ticket as a significant winner.
But it takes a lot of truth seeking to connect the dots in 2007. It took less work to do so in 2012. Even less work in 2015.
* * *
And NO work now.
Some “National Review” writers are punching back, perhaps extra hard to make up for the Nicholas Frankovich post.
Kyle Smith — “Nathan Phillips Lied. The Media Bought It.”
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/nathan-phillips-lied-the-media-bought-it/
Charles Cooke — “Nathan Phillips Is Full of It”
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/nathan-phillips-is-full-of-it/
David French — “Nathan Phillips’s Interview with CNN Is Full of Falsehoods, Inconsistencies, and Nonsense”
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/nathan-phillips-interview-cnn-falsehoods-inconsistencies/
Maybe the poor pundits are delusional from groupthink? All the narratives are running together. It’s like a mass hallucination that the Covington boys were the staged pack of running boys in the toxic Gillette ad— who burst out into the streets to bully the oppressed — and confirmation to the Supreme Court.
Playing Devil’s Advocate for “National Review” and all the “cuck RINOs” that people like Ace love to rail against…
Trump is a wrecking ball, a blowhard, and a man with a quite unappetizing history. If he makes some yuge mistakes, he could sink the GOP and the conservative movement as thoroughly as Nixon did, arguably worse, since the Democratics are unapologetically ruled by the left and identity politics more than ever before, and for who knows how long.
If “character is destiny” as some claim in general and Jonah Goldberg in particular when it comes to Trump, Trump’s presidency will inevitably blow up and then where will we be? Worse off than if Hillary had won? Maybe.
My take is Trump’s character is not as bad as one might think. Perhaps he is like Sam Spade in “The Maltese Falcon”:
Don’t be too sure I’m as crooked as I’m supposed to be. That sort of reputation might be good business, bringing high-priced jobs and making it easier to deal with the enemy…
I think if Trump were going to blow up, he would have done it by now.
Michael, I am not a SEAL nor have I ever maintained an SR-71. The closest I ever got to a Blackbird was at NAS Fallon in the early nineties. A Blackbird had an in flight emergency and had to land. The Air Force sent a special security team to make sure nobody got close to the plane. Even though they kept us about a mile away we could see the fuel leaking like a flood. The thing about the sixties technology that was what the SR-71 consisted of is that it only sealed up when the plane was supersonic at altitude.
That’s what I know about Blackbirds. Also, the aircrew are lousy pool players. At least, the two I met.
“National Review” (and others, too many others) got played.
It can happen. Give ’em a break.
Why? Because essentially—essentially!!—they are on the side of Good.
Essentially (with some exceptions…but how does that expression go? Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater?).
Yes, NR should have waited—or because news organizations and really CAN’T WAIT, it should have said something like: “This is how the incident has been reported; and THIS IS WHY WE ARE WAITING FOR CONFIRMATION” (“THIS…” being the broken, hyper-partisan nature of the greviously—or rather, disgustingly if, alas no longer shockingly—dishonest MSM).
And yes, NR should have been more forthright about its mistake and should have pledged that they will TRY to make sure such a travesty doesn’t happen again.
======
All this being said, this brouhaha is NOISE that is making all of us take our (collective) eye off the ball.
That ball being the criminality of the Obama/Clinton machine and the attempt to cover it up (and then cover up the cover-up, ad nauseum):
https://disobedientmedia.com/2019/01/death-of-russiagate-mueller-team-tied-to-mifsuds-network/
and
https://www.theepochtimes.com/baker-testimony-reveals-perkins-coie-lawyer-provided-fbi-with-information-on-alfa-bank-allegations_2773855.html
This brouhaha—this civil war on the right—is precisely what helps the Democrats obscure and obfuscate their—ongoing—shameless criminality.
Note the intra-right “issue”; but don’t fall for it.
Gotta keep our eye on the ball.
About the most studly thing I did in the Navy was spending lots of time on the simulator learning how to work the mighty, mighty AWG-9. I never got a hop, though. The reason why was the air wing surgeon. He was in a paid flight status and I wasn’t. One of the RIOs mansplained this to me. LT Cox, call sign Sucker.
After I went to SERE just to take away every excuse my OPS O had to deny me a ride, he basically put an arm around my shoulder and said, “Holy.” That was my call sign as my last name rhymes with Toledo. “We’d like to give you a ride. But if we did we couldn’t deny “No Lock Doc” a ride.
No Lock Doc let an SU-15 Flagon sneak up on one of the airwing’s F-14s. It was a lousy airplane. It was like Manny Pacquiao getting beat by some amateur.
If they gave me a hop they’d run out of excuses. That was my brush with greatness.
Because my call sign was Holy the Sailors thought I was their chaplain. And they wanted to know why I was such a jerk if I was a man of the cloth.
If you have ever hung out with me on liberty you’d know I was no priest. As a matter of fact, Navy priests have hung out with me on liberty. And on Sunday morning they would laugh at me when I showed up for service.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069883/
“A lonely Navy sailor falls in love with a hooker and becomes a surrogate father figure for her son during an extended liberty, due to his service records being lost. “
Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram make this kind of stuff much worse. Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram enable far too many users to return to an electronic version of their junior high school (7th grade to be specific).
Huxley, Barry–I am curious if you would maintain that kind of generous spirit toward NRO if it was you or your son. Bearing false witness, malicious speech…big deals in the sight of God.
My brush with greatness was actually when I volunteered to go to the Philippines to fight terrorists. The Navy put out a call for officer with specific qualifications. They wanted an O-4 with a certain numbers of years in the fleet who had curriculum development experience. The idea was the guy would sail with the Philippine navy and then develop training for them as to how to battle the Moros et al.
I met all the requirements. Plus, I had spent time in the Philippines. It would have been a disaster for most people to have gone. I had the Krav Maga skills to maybe survive and I was barely fluent in Tagalog. So I defied the term NAVY. Never Again Volunteer Yourself, and I told my N2 that I wanted to go. I was probably the best qualified O-4 in the Navy for the job. Everyone was shocked. Normally people run and hide. My N2 sends my request up the chain of command, and the COS turns me down and says I WILL NOT VOLUNTEER for anything ever again.
And then he bought me drinks at the Yokosuka O Club.
Oh, yeah, they wanted an intel officer.
Yes, Barry Meislin. They make this kind of noise, first, because accusing conservative people is what they do, and because making the huge right to life event look bad helps their narrative, and because they needed to cover for the Buzzfeed boo-boo earlier in the week.
Using kids as targets, kids who didn’t deserve it, is nauseating.
Not only was I at Woodstock, I was there twice!
Uh … more actually. Then, again, I’m taking about the Woodstock in Northeastern Illinois. :-}
No tickets though. I could get them, I think, if I took the commuter train up there.
Regarding Woodstock: my roommate went. He was underwhelmed–a bunch of people doing dope in a field was how I recall him describing it. He didn’t seem to think it was any kind of big revolutionary deal. I think it was the movie that really created the myth.
I wasn’t old enough to be at Woodstock. Which is probably a good thing. I would have killed myself. Also, I will never be this cool.
Shuffling in the Lz.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2MTZ3VpyrY
The Grateful Dead were not happy with their performance at Woodstock. I don’t even know if the tape circulates among Deadheads. The movie and soundtrack recording helped create the myth but there were likely as many bad sets as there were good ones.
Aesop, since you asked about Woodstock though very OT by now:
It was three days but since it took me a day to get in and a day to get out I saw mostly just one day, Saturday. I scoped out a good place to sit, in the middle not too far from the stage, and watched music for 18 hour straight noon to 6AM, how I got through w/o using a restroom I don’t remember. The music was mostly good, high points were Sly and the Family Stone and The Who.
I think the reason Woodstock was a “deal” was that no one expected it. It was advertised as “Woodstock Music and Art Fair” and I pictured a few thousand people wandering around the woods looking at paintings, occasionally diverting to a stage where a few people were watching music LOL. I was a college freshman at the time. Fans of what was then “FM rock” flattered themselves into thinking they were an exclusive cult like the earlier beatniks when of course it was a mass phenomenon.
Also luckily it didn’t rain that day though there were storms the night before and morning after.
“I think the reason Woodstock was a “deal” was that no one expected it.” – FOAF
Much obliged for the reply; that jibes with some of the things I have read. Even the promoters were astounded, and the security (such as it was) became so quickly overwhelmed that they quit even asking for people to show their tickets.
I also have the impression that the “myth” was mostly created by the movie (as is most of the “history” of America and the world).
Every Generation needs a Myth, I suppose, but Woodstock is a very pale companion to WWI and II for our grandparents and parents.
PS and way OT: I highly recommend the recently released WWI documentary, “They Shall Never Grow Old.” Saw it Monday night in 3D and it is just as outstanding as the reveiws all say it is. Don’t miss it if it comes back around in your town. Be sure and stay for Jackson’s brief explanation of how they did the technical parts, and why he chose to the unusual approach of just letting the soldiers “speak for themselves” (brilliant IMHO).
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/01/retired-seal-nathan-phillips-not-a-vietnam-vet-he-was-a-refrigerator-mechanic-who-went-awol-three-times/
“The mainstream media ran with a narrative without fact checking and spread lies about the Covington teens to push their left-wing, anti-Christian agenda.
The media has just one job…and they fail at it everyday.”
https://www.steynonline.com/9148/the-drumbeat-of-the-mob
“There was another conservative virtue-signaling stampede over the weekend. A short video from the Lincoln Memorial went “viral” (notwithstanding its ubiquity, I’m keeping the word in scare-quotes because, like any other virus, this one should be contained): it purported to show a group of Catholic schoolboys in MAGA hats harassing an elderly Native American drummer. The lads were instantly identified as students from Covington Catholic High School, which I’d never heard of but is clearly the kind of tony white-privilege joint where they book Brett Kavanaugh to spike the punch at the gang-rape prom. So naturally social media instantly convicted them and moved on to the usual doxing and death threats. The school itself leapt to dissociate itself from its own pupils and threatened to expel them.
Midst the present fevers, my advice and practice is that, when the media are in lockstep on a particular “narrative”, proceed with caution and, if you must join the great thundering herd of independent minds, tag along at the tail end out of sight. A genuinely conservative temperament should be wary of crying “Me too!” and scampering after the media-Democrat-cultMarx bandwagon – if only because, regardless of the wrongs and rights, no true conservative should assist in furthering the nano-second due process of trial by social media, through which whole lives are destroyed by the reflex twitching drive-thru jury of Twitter. “Sentence first – verdict afterwards,” said Alice’s Queen. Hang him high – and we’ll figure out later what, if anything, he’s guilty of. That’s about as deeply unconservative a proposition as one could find. The cure is worse than whatever disease (racism, sexism, transphobia, Islamophobia) it claims to be healing.
Yet, instead of a prudent skepticism, my former colleagues at National Review joined the stampede and decided to get way out in front of the story
….
Unfortunately for the scolding schoolmarms of the right, the facts were not as they appeared to be from that brief clip. Over at Reason (with hindsight, a better name for a magazine than I used to think it was), Robby Soave watched the two hours of surrounding footage, and found – surprise, surprise! – that it told an entirely different story:
Far from engaging in racially motivated harassment, the group of mostly white, MAGA-hat-wearing male teenagers remained relatively calm and restrained despite being subjected to incessant racist, homophobic, and bigoted verbal abuse by members of the bizarre religious sect Black Hebrew Israelites…
…
Under sustained crude and obnoxious provocation, the boys were remarkably good-humored throughout – a credit to the school that threatens to expel them.
Halfway through, Jay’s “old Indian” decided to insert himself in between the Black Hebrew Israelites and the MAGA cracker-faggot-paedo schoolboys, and start his “Native American drumming”. A little ethnic drumming goes a long way with me. Have you ever heard that Japanese taiko drumming? It’s not exactly Buddy Rich. So I wouldn’t welcome someone doing it in my face, and needless to say, if a white male drummer (from the Edinburgh Tattoo, say) went up to some black kids and started drumming, it would be a hate crime.
…
Almost nothing about this story is as reported. Jay Nordlinger’s “old Indian” isn’t that old: he was born in 1955, which, not to be ungallant or anything, puts him in slightly-older-brother territory to Jay – who has known some seriously old men, like the recently departed Bernard Lewis, born 1916.
…
But, as the appellate judges say (hey, welcome to my world), we need not reach the merits of Mr Phillips’ antiquity, because long before that question arises the official media narrative turns out to be thoroughly bogus. This was just another fake hate crime – I believe you can do a Master’s in them at Oberlin.
My old boss at National Review, Rich Lowry, has deleted his Tweet, as has Jay Nordlinger (seconding Rich with a somewhat perfunctory “same here”),
…
That doesn’t quite do it for me. What’s disturbing about this fake hate crime is not that the Twitter mob scented blood in its nostrils and went bounding after its prey, but that a big chunk of Conservative Inc piled on, as enthusiastically as the left. And Jay Nordlinger’s finger-wagging about an “American disgrace” is absurd in its sanctimony: However you wish to characterize a professional tribal elder intervening in a showdown between upscale Catholic private-school pupils and “Black Hebrew Israelites”, it isn’t an “American” disgrace. An American disgrace is the declining life expectancy of white males due to addiction, or the collapse of the family in rural America, or a bipartisan political class admitting millions of unskilled illegal immigrants to the country so that MS-13 gangs are now a fact of life in suburban Long Island in order that the Dems can get voters and the GOP’s donors can get cheap labor …or any one of a ton of other “American disgraces” Conservative Inc doesn’t talk about because it only takes to the field on the left’s terms.
I talked on Rush last Friday about the folly, in philosophical terms, of always accepting your opponents’ premises, even unto accepting and advancing the notion that “western civilization” is hate speech. How is that in the interest of even the most milquetoast and watery version of “conservatism”?
But accepting not just your opponents’ framing of the argument but their most repulsive totalitarian rituals is even worse.The Orwellian Twitterstorm is something utterly disgusting: It reduces man to a cyber-jackal, feasting on whatever prey is tossed in his path. I have argued, at some length, that you cannot have truly conservative government in a liberal culture. Culture is like air – it’s all around, and you don’t even think about it. So we live in an age of social-media feeding frenzies that can vaporize a fellow’s Oscar-hosting gig or drive an unfortunate porn actress to suicide. There is nothing in the least bit “conservative” about such a world:It’s like the young student in Milan Kundera’s great novel of Warsaw Pact totalitarianism, The Joke, facing the party committee and wondering why none of his friends will speak up for him – except that it’s now at Spaceballs Ludicrous Speed, and the respectable right cannot even bring itself to forgo the pleasure of getting played for saps. Every time.”
AF I don’t think the movie created the Woodstock “myth” but it enhanced and sustained it.
Barry Meislin on January 23, 2019 at 5:11 am at 5:11 am said:
“National Review” (and others, too many others) got played.
It can happen. Give ’em a break.
Why? Because essentially—essentially!!—they are on the side of Good.
Essentially (with some exceptions…but how does that expression go? Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater?).
…
======
All this being said, this brouhaha is NOISE that is making all of us take our (collective) eye off the ball.
…
This brouhaha—this civil war on the right—is precisely what helps the Democrats obscure and obfuscate their—ongoing—shameless criminality.
Note the intra-right “issue”; but don’t fall for it.
Gotta keep our eye on the ball.
* * *
Barry is correct that the CovCathCaper is a deliberate distraction (so is most of the caterwauling about Trump!!!), but I am not inclined to cut NR and the other allegedly conservative media pundits any slack, for all the reasons listed on this blog and others for the last 4 days, the sleaziness of their treachery being admirably expressed by Mark Steyn in his evisceration.
Be sure and click through on Barry’s links about the Russian Collusion Scandal; interesting stuff, and some new-ish revelations that are now coming out to expand on previous snippits of information.
“Using kids as targets, kids who didn’t deserve it, is nauseating.”
I couldn’t agree more. It is nauseating. But what are you going to do when you are fighting an enemy that arms 8 year old kids with AKs?
https://www.hrw.org/topic/childrens-rights/child-soldiers
Child soldiers are among the worst. And they’re ruined as people. And it is nauseating. But when you face them you have no choice. You have to kill them.
I never had to do it. But I have friends who were given intel about a weapons cache. And they walked in and there was an 8 year old guarding it. Again, who puts a child in that position? Then you have to do what you have to do. And you can vomit later.
I dream of giving a room full of Syrian and Iraqi Christian girls a box of knives and putting them in a room with Islamic State “fighters” and letting them go to town.
And Yazidis.
“…The swastika is the symbol we associate with Nazi Germany. The Nazis not only started the biggest, bloodiest war in human history, but they also murdered millions of innocent people, including 6 million Jews.”
No, not to give the Nazis any credit. They were evil and bloody. But they were pikers compared to the Muslims.
https://www.sikhnet.com/news/islamic-india-biggest-holocaust-world-history
Once you rack up your first million you are officially evil.
Actually, once you murder one you are evil.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=UmgMEu_9n1s
“Islamic Holocaust of India (Part 1)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfxzFELB8To
“Islamic Holocaust of India (Part 2)”
AesopFan,
You have certainly expressed my opinions about this whole nauseating fracas most excellently well. (Redundancy for extra oomph.)
Thanks for the Steyn, by the way. And, from a comment to his column:
Thanks also for the mention of the Kundera book. On the list.
https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Andalusian-Paradise-Christians-Medieval/dp/1610170954
I can highly recommend this book.
“The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain”
If you were not a Muslim in medieval Spain you were not living in any sort of paradise. There has never been anywhere that Muslims ruled that granted non-Muslims anything close to equal rights. Or really anything close to decency. Because while Christians follow the rule that it is God who repays, it’s the duty of Muslims to take revenge on the “unbelievers” in this life.
Quran (3:56) – “As to those who reject faith, I will punish them with terrible agony in this world and in the Hereafter, nor will they have anyone to help.”
Quran (3:151) – “Soon shall We cast terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers, for that they joined companions with Allah, for which He had sent no authority”.
Quran (4:89) – “They but wish that ye should reject Faith, as they do, and thus be on the same footing (as they): But take not friends from their ranks until they flee in the way of Allah (From what is forbidden). But if they turn renegades, seize them and slay them wherever ye find them; and (in any case) take no friends or helpers from their ranks.”
Quran (4:101) – “And when you (Muslims) travel in the land, there is no sin on you if you shorten your Salat (prayer) if you fear that the disbelievers may attack you, verily, the disbelievers are ever unto you open enemies.”
Quran (5:33) – “The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His messenger and strive to make mischief in the land is only this, that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off on opposite sides or they should be imprisoned; this shall be as a disgrace for them in this world, and in the hereafter they shall have a grievous chastisement”
Quran (8:12) – “(Remember) when your Lord inspired the angels… “I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them”
Quran (8:15) – “O ye who believe! When ye meet those who disbelieve in battle, turn not your backs to them. (16)Whoso on that day turneth his back to them, unless maneuvering for battle or intent to join a company, he truly hath incurred wrath from Allah, and his habitation will be hell, a hapless journey’s end.”
This is just a small sample of what the book of the Muslims has to say about the rest of us. There is nothing good in it. Which isn’t to say that all Muslims hate other people. There Quran commands them to hate.
Surah 60:4 “There has already been for you an excellent pattern in Abraham and those with him, when they said to their people, “Indeed, we are disassociated from you and from whatever you worship other than Allah . We have denied you, and there has appeared between us and you animosity and hatred forever until you believe in Allah alone” except for the saying of Abraham to his father, “I will surely ask forgiveness for you, but I have not [power to do] for you anything against Allah . Our Lord, upon You we have relied, and to You we have returned, and to You is the destination.”
Seriously. Does any other “Holy Book” contain a command to hate?
In addition to the Bible I’ve read the Vedas and the Tipitaka. Never have I come across a command to hate in any other book. And note that Abraham is an excellent example until he prays for his father.
This, BTW, is why it’s extremely stupid for politicians to praise Islam as “One of the great Abrahamic faiths.” Muslims don’t know the Abraham of the Bible. When idiots like GWB praise Islam as one of the great Abrahamic faiths, Muslims think that he’s praising the fact that Abraham is supposed to hate use.
I am not and never have been an unmitigated fan of Reason, as it has always struck me as having a certain librul-elitist tendency of its own. In Robby Soave’s piece, most of which is very good, there is buried this bow to the theme of how the White Man, var. Americaniensis, looks down on the American Indian* and shows it by mocking the Indian and his culture, stereotyping him as “savage” and “uncivilized” and “primitive” [my boldface]:
https://reason.com/blog/2019/01/22/nick-sandmann-covington-catholic-racism
This assumption that sporting teams’ naming themselves after Indians or some part of their culture is a gesture of contempt!, indicative of the teams’ looking down on them, is stupid stupid stupid. These are names taken because the teams want to evoke what they mostly see as the praiseworthiness of Indians, in the context of their existence as competitive teams. “Fighting” in this context is what the team will do: Go out there and fight to win!
You don’t take on a name because it represents a people you despise.
This is a perfect example of supporting the idea that certain Designated Victim Groups are entitled to a nauseating degree of sensitive concern.
I don’t like it when NRO or TNR or TWS does it and I particularly don’t like it when Reason does it. Partly because Nick & his pals are supposed to be devoted to Reason–clear and rigorous thinking–and not supporting ideas that make Cultural Americans out to be a nation of insensitive, incompassionate, stupid, bigoted jerks. The Ugly American, indeed!
.
Sigh…get over it, ma’am…it’s just another example of the general elitist attitude toward the proles. It’s sickeningly insulting, but there it is.
It’s important to know that Muslims didn’t invent the idea that Al Andalus was some sort of interfaith Disney land. Protestants did. Visigothic Spain was a very sophisticated place. But it was Catholic. And back in the 18th century Protestants hated all things Catholic (I’m sure some still do). So they concocted a story that everything got better in Spain when the Visigoths were overthrown.
The myth gained additional purchase when the multiculturalists became ascendant. Then the Saudis picked up on the idea. But none of it is true.
Julie – there are a lot of people saying much the same things, and Steyn says them more wittily than most. I noticed the Chesterton quote and quite agree. Conserving is hard work; destroying, not so much.
Also agree with you about Reason’s reflexive genuflection to the Left; all of the conservative media does it. For instance, they all ran with “smirk” instead of “smile” unless the author deliberately chose to distinguish the two expressions.
And they say Fox News, NR, and other conservative, right-leaning sites are bad …
Steve57 said —
“It’s important to know that Muslims didn’t invent the idea that Al Andalus was some sort of interfaith Disney land.”
After 9/11 we were listening to Osama in Laden’s speech (in translation, of course), after which Al-Zawari came on. He said, “and we will reclaim Al-Andalus!” My wife turned to me and said, “We’re in for big trouble.”
Steve57: my experience has been that everyone is either a Seal or has worked on the SR-71
Steve57, Michael, neo, et al: Reminds me of when I was stationed in Germany — every German I met either fought on the Eastern Front or was on vacation in Argentina from 1933-1945.