I hate the military. Really. ABC News says so.
No kidding. ABC News political director Mark Halperin, who -- coincidentally, I'm sure -- has a book to flog, tells idiot talk-radio host (but I repeat myself) Hugh Hewitt that we in the media hate the military:
HH: And these liberals…you know, Terry Moran on this program said ... Terry Moran on this program from ABC, your colleague ...MH: Right.
HH: ... said that the media hates the military, has a deep suspicion of it. Do you agree with that?
MH: I totally agree. It’s one of the huge biases, along with gays, guns, abortion, and many other things.
Which, I guess, explains why I've spent so much time over the past two months on issues related to this.
And this guy is responsible for political coverage of one of the largest, wealthiest, most powerful mainstream-media news outlets in the world. The. Mind. Reels.
You could say a lot of things about mainstream journalists' relationship to the military ... like, say, that as is true of most Americans younger than about 45, most journalists have never served. You could say they frequently misunderstand the military. But "hate"? Uh, no, Mark, and the next time you decide to anoint yourself to speak on behalf of the mainstream media, please let me know in advance so that I can get a notarized disclaimer to the effect that anything you say may well not even reside in the same dimension as what I actually think, mmkay?
Comments (3)
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This resonates with the same lunacy as Scott Johnson's MSM Dem mouthpiece gaff with which I recently had so much fun.
But, if a conservative calls them out for being
wrong, we get branded as RINOs or worse, Liberals.
Posted on November 4, 2006 9:39 PM
Why are you blocking bloggers that disagree with you?
I have been reading some comments at --
http://theconalt.wordpress.com/2006/11/04/lex-reveals-the-evidence/
and he is asking why---
thanks
Posted on November 5, 2006 7:05 PM
meb, I'm not "blocking bloggers that disagree with me," although I'm not surprised that Sam would get that point wrong, deliberately or otherwise. Here's what I am doing, specifically: On this blog, I banned Sam and three other trolls. On this blog and my personal blog, I have begun moderating comments. I discuss my reasoning here.
I welcome disagreement; I enjoy a good argument.
But the key word there is "good," and that's the part of the game that Sam and a couple of other longtime trolls here simply couldn't get their heads around. A lot of their comments -- and I've left them all up so anyone can read them in context and judge for him/herself -- were nothing more than personal abuse. I'll give Sam credit for actually using his real name and e-mail address, but the others were using fake names, fake addresses or both. I can speculate on a lot of reasons why that might be, but at this point I don't care. At my personal blog, I haven't banned any individual commenters -- I don't have that capability; just IP addresses, which can be misleading -- but I'm moderating all comments and judging each on its merits, not its author. One of the guys I've banned here had a perfectly rational comment, albeit not one I agreed with, go up on my personal blog just a couple of days ago.
And I banned them not only for the gratuitous personal abuse -- which, the impressions of certain trolls to the contrary, I'm under no professional obligation to tolerate -- but also because that abuse monopolized the conversation and, I feared, was driving off more temperate readers and potential commenters. I once referred here to the trolls and me as a little dysfunctional family, but that bit of humor glossed over some real problems with the tone they were creating.
Perhaps the new registration system we're supposed to be getting (any time now!) will relieve me of the need to ban commenters by enabling us to hold individuals more accountable for their comments. I don't know. So 'til it's online, this is what I'm doing.
I've been online since joining CompuServe almost 20 years ago, and I've observed that this has been the fate of almost every online community that lasts any length of time: Eventually, someone has to step in to moderate or else a few people ruin things for everyone else. That sucks, but the alternative usually means letting the online community die.
I haven't had a chance to check page views on this blog yet, but on my personal blog, where I made the same change at the same time a few weeks ago, my readership has gone up fairly dramatically, finally returning to the levels it had been hitting before I took my blogging hiatus last winter. (That little bit of self-indulgence cost me about 80% of my regular readership.) That could be coincidence, of course.
Posted on November 7, 2006 8:43 AM