“Tarting up” and “dumbing down” the news
is how veteran reporter Dan Rather dubbed Katie Couric’s effect on the
"CBS Evening News." The job description does not belong exclusively to
Couric. The many females manning the front desks on cable, Y chromosome
carriers included, do their daily bit to entrench a shift from hard to
soft-news stories.
CNN’s Anderson Cooper is a major culprit in changing the face of news.
Forehead furrowed into a perpetual I-feel-your-pain frown, Cooper’s
broadcasts are an interminable kvetch that elevates feelings above
facts.
Needless to say, the Cooper/Couric effect has not enhanced the numbing
presidential debates. Cooper presided over
a Q&A session between YouTube users and the eight Democratic
candidates. CNN’s Senior Vice President David Bohrman and Political
Director Sam Feist, no less, were said to have helped Cooper and the
crew handpick the cross-section of freaks and exhibitionists who debuted
during the debate.
Here’s Cooper unraveling a skein of complex topics aimed at “keeping
them honest” (a tagline he uses on his “Anderson Cooper 360º”
sob-along): “Senator Dodd, you've been in Congress more than 30 years.
Can you honestly say you're any different? Congressman Kucinich,
your supporters certainly say you are different. Even your
critics would certainly say you are different… What do you have
that Senator Clinton and Senator Obama do not have?” [A trophy wife?]
And the deft follow-up: “Senator Clinton, you were involved in that
[how-am-I-different] question. I want to give you a chance to respond.
Senator Obama, you were also involved in that [how-am-I-different]
question as well. Please respond.”
Asked by a YouTubester to define “liberal,” Hillary Clinton revealed
that she knows the word originally denoted the classical liberalism of
the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, but then settled on
“progressive” as the label of choice for her Fabian plank.
Classical liberals (this writer) are distinguished in that the only
rights they recognize are the individual’s right to life, liberty and
property, and the pursuit of happiness. The sole role of a legitimate
government is to protect only those liberties. Why life, liberty, and
property, and not housing, food, education, health care, child
benefits, emotional well-being, enriching employment, ad infinitum?
Because the former impose no obligations on other free individuals; the
latter enslave some in the service of others.
Which is what Hillary and her fellow front-runners all want. Indeed,
Clinton was correct to state that the old liberalism, which she knows of
but doesn’t value, entailed “the freedom to achieve.” What Hillary
failed to divulge is that the founding fathers were classical liberals;
she is a Fabian socialist. Social democrats like Hillary (and the
Republican candidates bar Ron Paul) presuppose a strong centralized
state to ensure “effective” wealth distribution. State intervention,
naturally, always leads to more of the same, beginning with selective
nationalization of sections of the economy such as health care.
Individuals unfortunate enough to have chosen medicine as a vocation
will soon be turned into rightless serfs.
Contra Hillary’s illiberalism, the liberalism of the founders holds that
the individual has the right to pursue happiness, but no right
whatsoever to demand that government rope others into working to make
him happy and healthy. Although the Hildebeest professed a belief in
individual rights and freedoms, her idea of individual rights comports
with what Harvard scholar Richard Pipes termed "the right to the
necessities of life at public expense, i.e., the right to something that
was not one's own." Her claim to the contrary notwithstanding, Hillary’s
“progressivism” is as American as Jalal Talabani is Jeffersonian.
Next, a pontifically solemn Cooper announced that questions on race
would feature prominently in his YouTube selection. Intrepid journalist
that he is, Cooper swooped down for the kill. Did he raise the need to
address injustices inherent in
the fact that “blacks are an estimated 39 times more likely to
commit a violent crime against a white than vice versa”? Did he take up
the inequities that flow from blacks being “2.25 times more likely
to commit officially-designated hate crimes against whites than vice
versa”? Perish the thought! After all, Cooper has his finger on the
political pulse: “Senator Obama, how do you address those who say you're
not authentically black enough?” (Ignore the syntactical redundancy;
grammar is so yesterday.)
Then came shake-down time. The conscience of the nation (and the son of
heiress Gloria Vanderbilt to whom money is no object), Cooper featured
the following YouTubester’s demand: “Is [sic] African-Americans ever
going to get reparations for slavery?” Most of the candidates disavowed
reparations. But, coupled with assorted race-based redistribution plans,
they vowed to continue to take “jobs away from one group in order to
compensate a second group to correct injustices caused by a third group
who mistreated a fourth group at an earlier point in history”—that’s
Edwin Locke of the Ayn Rand Institute’s distillation of America’s
discriminatory hiring practices.
The evening meandered into mindless prattle about Iraq—to stay or to go
or to decamp to Darfur, That Was the Question. Cooper, however, was
quick to retreat to less shaky grounds, preferring to plunge deep into
the guts of the education crisis:
Cooper: “Who was your favorite teacher and why? Senator Gravel?”
©2007 By Ilana Mercer
WorldNetDaily.com
June 27
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