The president attempts to marginalize Fox News by stating that they are not a news organization but rather, offer a perspective. Then he turns around and meets with msnbc on air personalities Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow.
You can't make this stuff up.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Saturday, October 17, 2009
nexus of perversion
Haven't posted in a while as the material on hypocrisy, immorality, narcissism and delusion is nearly overwhelming. But given several recent events it's hard not to notice the wheels getting a little wobbly, if not outright falling off of the car that carries fellow travelers among the left, hollywood and the nobel committee.
First was the defense of the apparent indefensible. Roman Polanski spends 30 years in exile from the U.S. to avoid prosecution on charges of drugging, raping and sodomizing a 13 year old girl.
In defending their friend, the points made by his allies amounted to these:
(1) The crime wasn't that bad;
(2) it was bad, but it was so long ago that it no longer mattered;
(3) Polanski had suffered already: family members had died in concentration camps and his wife and unborn child were murdered;
(4) it might have mattered if it had been done by a lesser creative talent, but middle-class standards of law and of morals do not apply to artistes such as he.
Whoopi Goldberg, that pillar of moral clarity, exonerated Polanski as it wasn't "rape-rape" and thus not important. Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein said Polanski deserved to be cleared of all charges as he so deeply cared for "art and its place in the world." Tom Shales of the Washington Post in a sympathetic review of a sympathetic HBO documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired: "Polanski belongs to a rarefied subculture: celebrities hounded by the state."
Then comes David Letterman. Turns out he has had many sexual trysts with women who were in his employ. It was all bliss until one of Letterman's producers, with whom he was sharing a woman, decided to blackmail Letterman to the tune of $2 million. Though not an artiste on the scale of Polanski, Letterman was artist enough that he should still be allowed to lampoon political figures whose transgressions were no worse than his was, not to mention being free to slime other politicians with no transgressions whatever such as calling Sarah Palin "slutty" and joking that her 14-year-old daughter had been "knocked up." The Posts' Shales is there again to assuage as he grieved "One of the many sad things," was that now Letterman would be "lumped in with other sexually misbehaving celebrities, even though he stands head and heart above most of them." As Shales justifies, Palin deserves the derision as she's a "two bit politician". What a great heart.
The trifecta comes with the nobel prize committee awarding to Obama just nine months into his presidency. This being consistent with the nobel committee poking a stick in the eye of conservatives by awarding to such luminaries as Jimmy Carter (mid-East peace), Mohamed ElBaradei (anti-U.S. U.N. arms inspector), and Al Gore (global warming). Even many on the left see the absurdity of this most recent award with comments ranging from "While it is OK to give school children prizes for 'effort' . . . statesmen should probably be held to a higher standard" (Financial Times's Gideon Rachman) to "I like Barack Obama as much as the next liberal, but this is a farce," (Peter Beinart).
Sadly, the nobel committee, the defenders of Polanski and Letterman have no sense of irony, little probity and even less integrity.
First was the defense of the apparent indefensible. Roman Polanski spends 30 years in exile from the U.S. to avoid prosecution on charges of drugging, raping and sodomizing a 13 year old girl.
In defending their friend, the points made by his allies amounted to these:
(1) The crime wasn't that bad;
(2) it was bad, but it was so long ago that it no longer mattered;
(3) Polanski had suffered already: family members had died in concentration camps and his wife and unborn child were murdered;
(4) it might have mattered if it had been done by a lesser creative talent, but middle-class standards of law and of morals do not apply to artistes such as he.
Whoopi Goldberg, that pillar of moral clarity, exonerated Polanski as it wasn't "rape-rape" and thus not important. Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein said Polanski deserved to be cleared of all charges as he so deeply cared for "art and its place in the world." Tom Shales of the Washington Post in a sympathetic review of a sympathetic HBO documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired: "Polanski belongs to a rarefied subculture: celebrities hounded by the state."
Then comes David Letterman. Turns out he has had many sexual trysts with women who were in his employ. It was all bliss until one of Letterman's producers, with whom he was sharing a woman, decided to blackmail Letterman to the tune of $2 million. Though not an artiste on the scale of Polanski, Letterman was artist enough that he should still be allowed to lampoon political figures whose transgressions were no worse than his was, not to mention being free to slime other politicians with no transgressions whatever such as calling Sarah Palin "slutty" and joking that her 14-year-old daughter had been "knocked up." The Posts' Shales is there again to assuage as he grieved "One of the many sad things," was that now Letterman would be "lumped in with other sexually misbehaving celebrities, even though he stands head and heart above most of them." As Shales justifies, Palin deserves the derision as she's a "two bit politician". What a great heart.
The trifecta comes with the nobel prize committee awarding to Obama just nine months into his presidency. This being consistent with the nobel committee poking a stick in the eye of conservatives by awarding to such luminaries as Jimmy Carter (mid-East peace), Mohamed ElBaradei (anti-U.S. U.N. arms inspector), and Al Gore (global warming). Even many on the left see the absurdity of this most recent award with comments ranging from "While it is OK to give school children prizes for 'effort' . . . statesmen should probably be held to a higher standard" (Financial Times's Gideon Rachman) to "I like Barack Obama as much as the next liberal, but this is a farce," (Peter Beinart).
Sadly, the nobel committee, the defenders of Polanski and Letterman have no sense of irony, little probity and even less integrity.
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