Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That…
It appears there IS a sort of accountability for the trolls and moonbats who have appointed themselves Masters of the Fourth Estate: Eason Jordan, the verminous traitor who accused US troops of deliberately assassinating journalists at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last month, has resigned as the Communist News Network’s Minister of Propaganda:
Riiiiiiiight! Apology NOT accepted, a$$-hat.
The end of this affair is encouraging for three reasons:
I -- Another dragon has been slain, as Izmud would doubtless put it. Another freak spouting leftist, secular humanist internationalism from the corridors of privilege (“speaking lies from power?”) has been silenced. The dude can probably work for Atrios, Air America, Michael Moore, or some other fever swamp venue, but his days in the mainstream (which is distinguished from the swamp only by public reputation, not by intellectual differences) are over**. Interestingly, all the venues linked above have ignored the Jordan resignation so far.
II -- Bloggers (again) did the slaying. Glenn Reynolds, Power Line, and Michelle Malkin broke and followed the story, not letting the mainstream press get away with their attempts to spike the story or to deploy WMD (weapons of mass deception) against it. The mainstream media (MSM) was even forced to admit that bloggers did Jordan in, just as they helped do in the Bush Guard Documents Big Lie and John “Mekong” Kerry’s presidential campaign. We do, in fact, have a responsible and responsive Fourth Estate in the US, but the MSM is only a very tiny and unreliable part of it. The most forward-thinking and socially useful part of it consists of samizdata*** like the blogs, talk radio, indymedia outlets such as Drudge, and the internet itself. These form a complex, distributed, free market-like system with many emergent nodes, rather than a small, exclusive monopolistically competitive system with huge barriers to entry like the MSM. This is a very good thing for a free society.
III -- The demise of this dragon and his story will help conveniently obscure the truth: that we in the military DO deliberately target journalists for fun and profit (but mostly for fun). You see, this was a black program until recently, accomplished only by elite SOF units like Epsilon Force (one codeword level deeper than Delta Force) and kept entirely under wraps for decades. Who do you think pummeled Dan Rather on that dark street corner in 1986? (Dan, a long-time double agent who recently had to be outed, really was “Kenneth” and there really was a frequency. Dan had been careless. We almost had to waste him that night.) The over-tasking of Special Forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Massachusetts led the Administration—carelessly in my view—to allow regular Army and Marine units to be read into the program. Once this happened, of course, leaks were just a matter of time. They botched it, just like the Guard botched Abu Ghuriab. Leave it to some damn amateurs to come along and spoil everybody’s fun! Still, they managed to pot twelve of the b*$+*ds before getting caught. Now that the public’s attention has been diverted, I hope we can get back to the serious (and fun) business of hunting journalists. Perhaps this story will discredit the Left’s cause enough to allow us to resume torturing prisoners! Gee, I hope so. My cattle prods are getting rusty.
Monk
* (I know…I know…uncharitable of me. Gay Jowl Syndrome is a terrible affliction, not to be made fun of.)
** Good analysis here
*** Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR[Russian = self-publishing house]
Jordan said he was quitting to avoid CNN being "unfairly tarnished" by the controversy. . . .Gotta love a guy who’ll take one for the team…
"I never meant to imply U.S. forces acted with ill intent when U.S. forces accidentally killed journalists, and I apologize to anyone who thought I said or believed otherwise," Jordan said in a memo to fellow staff members at CNN.
Riiiiiiiight! Apology NOT accepted, a$$-hat.
But the damage had been done, compounded by the fact that no transcript of his actual remarks has turned up. There was an online petition calling on CNN to find a transcript, and fire Jordan if he said the military had intentionally killed journalists.Mighty interesting, that bit about “no transcript.” Still, word got out. This was a pure case of “You Know You’ve Screwed Up When…” YKYSUW # 472: …Rep. Barney Frank (D – Gerbilchussetts) considers your remarks so over-the-top that he has to lisp out against them.*
The end of this affair is encouraging for three reasons:
I -- Another dragon has been slain, as Izmud would doubtless put it. Another freak spouting leftist, secular humanist internationalism from the corridors of privilege (“speaking lies from power?”) has been silenced. The dude can probably work for Atrios, Air America, Michael Moore, or some other fever swamp venue, but his days in the mainstream (which is distinguished from the swamp only by public reputation, not by intellectual differences) are over**. Interestingly, all the venues linked above have ignored the Jordan resignation so far.
II -- Bloggers (again) did the slaying. Glenn Reynolds, Power Line, and Michelle Malkin broke and followed the story, not letting the mainstream press get away with their attempts to spike the story or to deploy WMD (weapons of mass deception) against it. The mainstream media (MSM) was even forced to admit that bloggers did Jordan in, just as they helped do in the Bush Guard Documents Big Lie and John “Mekong” Kerry’s presidential campaign. We do, in fact, have a responsible and responsive Fourth Estate in the US, but the MSM is only a very tiny and unreliable part of it. The most forward-thinking and socially useful part of it consists of samizdata*** like the blogs, talk radio, indymedia outlets such as Drudge, and the internet itself. These form a complex, distributed, free market-like system with many emergent nodes, rather than a small, exclusive monopolistically competitive system with huge barriers to entry like the MSM. This is a very good thing for a free society.
III -- The demise of this dragon and his story will help conveniently obscure the truth: that we in the military DO deliberately target journalists for fun and profit (but mostly for fun). You see, this was a black program until recently, accomplished only by elite SOF units like Epsilon Force (one codeword level deeper than Delta Force) and kept entirely under wraps for decades. Who do you think pummeled Dan Rather on that dark street corner in 1986? (Dan, a long-time double agent who recently had to be outed, really was “Kenneth” and there really was a frequency. Dan had been careless. We almost had to waste him that night.) The over-tasking of Special Forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Massachusetts led the Administration—carelessly in my view—to allow regular Army and Marine units to be read into the program. Once this happened, of course, leaks were just a matter of time. They botched it, just like the Guard botched Abu Ghuriab. Leave it to some damn amateurs to come along and spoil everybody’s fun! Still, they managed to pot twelve of the b*$+*ds before getting caught. Now that the public’s attention has been diverted, I hope we can get back to the serious (and fun) business of hunting journalists. Perhaps this story will discredit the Left’s cause enough to allow us to resume torturing prisoners! Gee, I hope so. My cattle prods are getting rusty.
Monk
* (I know…I know…uncharitable of me. Gay Jowl Syndrome is a terrible affliction, not to be made fun of.)
** Good analysis here
*** Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR[Russian = self-publishing house]
posted by Monk | 17:29
