Robert Byrd, the longest-serving member of the Senate, died early this morning after a long period of ill health. He has become something a familiar figure to anyone who pays much attention to politics. The people of West Virginia will miss him.
A repentant recruiter for the Ku Klux Klan, who filibustered against the passage of the Civil Rights Act, he demonstrated that change was possible.
He was also a Senate historian, which gave him a certain standing with other senators. He was extremely good at bringing pork back to his home district. Senate seniority rules are one of the great engines of corruption in this nation. But they lead to loyalty among constituents.
For many decades, he favored legislation protecting the coal industry, which is important in his state, thought vilified by today's Democratic Party leadership (unless the coal industry is in a country like China, where it is largely ignored while their "progress in green jobs" is touted as an example for the USA). (And we won't even MENTION the coal mines in North Korea.
The governor of West Virginia plans not to declare his seat vacant until after July 3, in order to avoid an election to replace him this year. Update: Some segments of the press laid the praise for Byrd on a little thick. Check the Trent Lott Moment link for a brilliant example of a double standard in the press and in politics, after reading what Jim Geraghty said:
Remember yesterday morning when I told everyone to be on their best behavior about the death of West Virginia senator Robert Byrd? Yeah, sorry about that; I didn't realize the epic scale of the whitewash we were going to have to endure. I got through about midmorning, but somewhere around the headline "With Byrd's death, the era of statesmen fades"I found myself unable to resist wondering whether in his honor today all white bedsheets would be flown at half-mast.The other senators noted by the Star-Telegram as representatives of the dwindling "Era of Statesmen" in the Senate include Joe Biden - now Vice President, Edward Kennedy - vicious and fact-challenged concerning conservative appointees and policies even if hard-working and collegial with conservatives in the senate (and also a symbol of the benefits of power when one is facing criminal charges, concerning in particular the drowning of a certain young woman), and the ethically-challenged Chris Dodd - soon to retire after learning that he was unlikely to be re-elected.
I understand not speaking ill of the dead, but the mainstream media pushes it; the career of Robert Byrd may have set a new record for glossing over horrific past views and behavior, and for praising garden-variety corruption. . .
By way of contrast to the whitewashing of Senator Byrd's past, the same day, senate hearings got underway for a Supreme Court nominee, Elena Kagan, a liberal who who may have compared the National Rifle Association to the Ku Klux Klan. The Ku Klux Klan opposed the NRA's primary agenda (maintaining the right to bear arms under the Second Amendment). The KKK historically supported gun control legislation in order to prevent black people from owning guns. Ms. Kagan is a big supporter of gun control.
Ironically, (update: or maybe not so ironically) the Supreme Court also ruled today that municipalities and states could not ban ownership of firearms. The racist roots of gun control were cited. Update: The Second Amendment is now "normal law".
Municipal gun control laws in America are extremely ineffective at controlling crime, anyway. Chicago's law, the basis of the Supreme Court challenge, was associated with very high murder rates. Many Chicago politicians and their friends got exemptions from the ban on possessing handguns, through some fancy manipulations of the law.
Contrasts: Secrecy to hide collusion between certain members of the Press is important, secrecy to protect National Security is NOT important
Heard an interesting discussion about this book on Dennis Prager's program today. It is about the extraordinary recklessness of today's reporters concerning the safety and security of the United States and other Western countries. In the case of a program to uncover terrorist financing, the enemy was given details of how our program worked because it was an "interesting yarn". Dennis remarked that every once in a while, his breath was still taken away by something new he learned on his show. He said he would always remember the moment he learned about this extraordinarily shallow destructiveness.
Shortly after hearing about this, I learned that some of the damage done by the dying New York Times has now been undone.
Meanwhile, not long after reporters at the Rolling Stone got General McCrystal fired by breaking a type of secrecy agreement (reporting "off-the-record" comments) 400 liberal journalists at the Washington Post, New York Times and elsewhere, find themselves hoping to keep secret the correspondence on an e-mail list which they used to discuss stories which would further the liberal agenda. Andrew Breitbart describes one glaring example of collusion by the mainstream media:
Yes, the mainstream media that came together to play up the false allegations that the “N-Word” was hurled 15 times by Tea Party participants at the Congressional Black Caucus outside the Capitol the day before the “Obamacare” vote, is the same MSM that colluded to make sure the American public accepted the smear, and refused to show the exculpatory videos that disproved the incendiary charges of Tea Party racism.Update: The chance for some journalist to become a today's "Deep Throat" by exposing the corruption of the mainstream media. It appears that many liberal journalists consider privacy to be important only when it comes to them and the issues which they think are important. Support for Sullivan's breathtakingly hypocritical position by other liberal journalists proves that being a liberal means you can never be called a hypocrite. So long as you support the cause.
Ezra Klein’s “JournoList 400” is the epitome of progressive and liberal collusion that conservatives, Tea Partiers, moderates and many independents have long suspected and feared exists at the heart of contemporary American political journalism. Now that collusion has been exposed when one of the weakest links in that cabal, Dave Weigel, was outed. Weigel was, in all likelihood, exposed because – to whoever the rat was who leaked his emails — he wasn’t liberal enough.
Indiscreet words like those of David Weigel, exposed by one member of the Journolist, should probably not be taken as seriously as the existence of such lists and their use to shape the content of the news. For a brief overview of this issue, glance through the search results here, back through March of 2010, when the Washington Post hired David Weigel to cover news about conservatives. Ann Althouse corrects the record concerning defamation on Journolist. Eric Boehlert works for the George Soros-funded Media Matters:
Eric B. says:
Althouse, a law school prof and very public blogger, was thinking out loud about suing the owner of Journolist to find out if any of the 400 journalists on the listserv ever wrote anything nasty about her in their private emails. (Ego much?)Eric Boehlert continues to write about me like that even though he has no idea what the thing I wrote that he just quoted says. I cited a specific item of defamation against me that was published on the web and that remains there.
A journalist should know better than to be so careless with facts and language. But methods for manipulating language, even including changing the meaning of words, for political purposes is now taught in college. Journalism went downhill fast when schools of journalism started emphasizing the possibility for reporters to "make a difference" rather than emphasizing that they should report the news. No wonder so few people now trust the media.
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