As of this writing, Rep. Ron Paul—the ultimate outsider and quintessential anti-establishment presidential candidate—is the favorite to win the Iowa caucuses, scheduled to take place on January 3, 2012. Polls such as Insider Advantage and Public Policy Polling place Paul in the lead, at 23 and 24 percent respectively, to Mitt Romney’s 20 percent and Newt Gingrich’s 14 percent.

From ignoring Congressman Paul, the Republican Party establishment and mainstream media have moved to strategizing on how to discount his lead, and likely win, in Iowa.Especially exercised is the Republican Party of Iowa. Its functionaries seem willing to delegitimize Iowa poll results—and the importance of the Iowa caucuses as harbingers of things to come in the national convention—if these don’t fall in line with the Party line. Apparently, caucus-goers who dare to “reward” candidates “who are unrepresentative of the broader party” deserve to be discredited.

What Grand Old Party apparatchiks cannot accept is that voters are coming around to reality dictated truths. And when “[t]hings fall apart; the center cannot hold.” Against this backdrop, I was interviewed, on December 15, by the Russia Today (RT) television network, a broadcaster that does not abide herd behavior. Topics covered: The rise of Ron Paul, his rivals, and the Representative’s chances of parlaying his accomplishments in Iowa (to be repeated, we hope, in the Granite State and South Carolina) into a national win.

Terry Krepel authors a website called ConWebWatch. “The focus of ConWebWatch,” Krepel declares on the site, is “the ConWeb—large, well-funded, Internet-based conservative ‘news’ organizations [such as] NewsMax, WorldNetDaily and CNSNews.com.” (I’ve inserted words in parenthesis so as to alert the reader to the edit. Accurate reporting should enable readers to distinguish editorial from authorial input.)

As a biographical note, Krepel adds that he “became employed by Media Matters for America in July 2004.” At his Huffington-Post perch, Krepel is duly described as a “Media Matters senior editor.” Media Matters for America purports to be a “progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.”

Our ace writer ought to have stated that he has been employed at Media Matters since 2004. “I became employed” thus might be ugly English for, “I was once but am no longer employed by Media Matters.” Conversely, perhaps this is a fellow whose intelligible written English is confined to the words “racial discrimination”?

Himself Krepel describes as “a veteran of 17 years in professional journalism as a newspaper writer, designer and editor. I know the ins and outs of the business and how it can be used and misused—and I see how the conservative Internet media is misusing journalism.”

His mission Krepel defines as documenting “the distortions, excesses and hypocrisy of these conservative media sites.” Almost daily Krepel will dissect what Joseph Farah, Erik Rush, Aaron Klein, Jerome Corsi and others on WND.com and CNSNews.com have to say.

His method, crows Krepel, is to “hoist the conservative media on the petard of hypocrisy, accuracy and objectivity” by “using their own words.”

Untrue; at least in my case. Krepel has libeled me not by “using [my] own words.” Instead, this self-styled “veteran of professional journalism” has omitted quotation marks from sections of the column, “Don’t Believe Michelle Obama,” which he excerpted liberally on ConWebWatch. (The omission begins with, “Washington and Westminster,” and ends with “the disaster that is post-apartheid South Africa.”)

Leaving off quotation marks has allowed Krepel to seamlessly inject his own interpretations of my words into his “report,” and frame these superimposed distortions as opinions I promote.

Krepel began his litany by accusing me, on June 12, 2011, of lionizing Eugene Terre’Blanche, the murdered leader of South Africa’s Afrikaner Resistance Movement. This daughter of an anti-apartheid activist (me) also stands in the dock for “pining for the days of apartheid,” and helping to hide Terre’Blanche’s “group’s history of violence and white supremacism.”

In the “War on White South Africa,” I had reported on the manner in which the controversial 69-year-old Mr. Terre’Blanche was bludgeoned to a pulp with pangas and pipes by two black farmhands. The old Afrikaner had not threatened anyone.

But Terry Krepel bays for the blood of Terre’Blanche, who “reaped what he sowed.” Or so writes Krepel of Terre’Blanche’s “violent life” and “violent death.”

What, then, of the many farming families who’ve met a similar fate?

As my book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” documents, South Africa’s farmland is a vast burial ground for thousands of farmers. How does Krepel dismiss their deaths? And why does Krepel conceal that the Terre’Blanche killing bore the telltale signs of a farm murder? Do these victims deserve the fate that befell Terre’Blanche?

Pray tell us, Terry Krepel, if you believe that the indefatigable Dr. Gregory Stanton of Genocide Watch also harbors “racial ambitions,” for expressly recognizing that innocent Anglo- and Afrikaner farmers, many of whom might have held racially impure thoughts, are being targeted? For some time now, Dr. Stanton has been warning about the systematic extermination of rural whites in South Africa.

Alas, for failing to celebrate Terre’Blanche’s murder, I am said to be a lionizer and a sympathizer. Contra Krepel—and without fear or favor—I sympathize with innocents murdered, no matter their political persuasion, a stand that I extend to Col Muammar Gaddafi’s son and grandsons, who were eliminated by the proxies of President Barack Obama.

As do I disavow democracy. The rights to life, liberty and property were not meant to be subject to the vagaries of majority rule. For this perfectly proper position, Krepel has implied that I’m racist.

Ignored by Krepel is what every democratic theorist worth his salt knows: South Africa doesn’t even qualify as a democracy. The scholarly data cited in my book stipulate that a prerequisite for a classical liberal democracy is that majority and minority status should be interchangeable and fluid; that a ruling majority party should be as likely to become a minority party as the obverse. By contrast, in South Africa, the majority and the minorities are permanent, not temporary.

That’s untrammeled tyranny.

By leaving off quotations marks—and failing to separate, via block quotes, much of my excerpted words from his own superimposed interpretations—Krepel has been able to impugn me for ideas I have not expressed. To go by Krepel, my ultimate purpose is that “people not like [me] shouldn’t get to vote.” Commensurate with Krepel’s dishonest journalism, this assertion is unsupported by citations.

“Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa” is faithful to the classical liberalism of the American Founding Fathers. Thus, the book distinguishes between natural rights and political rights, as classical liberals of the founders’ era did. These thinkers saw men as endowed with natural—but not necessarily political—rights. People fuss about apartheid having denied the majority its democratic rights (the vote). Denying people political privileges does not necessarily amount to depriving them of natural justice.

As explained in the book, apartheid “did more than disenfranchise the majority; it denied the majority’s economic freedoms. Citizenship rights, after all, are not natural rights. It is natural rights that the law ought to always and everywhere respect and uphold. “In its police state methods—indefinite detention without trial, declarations of a state of emergency—apartheid destroyed the individual defenses of equality before the law, the presumption of innocence, habeas corpus and various other very basic freedoms. That the apartheid regime contravened natural justice by depriving Africans of rights to property and due process is indisputable as it is despicable.” (Page
231.)

Disputes about democracy notwithstanding, there can be no disagreement over Krepel’s crappy journalism.

©2011 By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
September 2

Republican and Democratic media whores briefly came clean about ignoring presidential hopeful Ron Paul. Then they promptly returned to ignoring him.

No sooner had Fox News’ Megyn Kelly and CNN’s Piers Morgan interviewed Dr. Paul about his untouchable status among their colleagues, than John King of the eponymous CNN show could be heard recounting the winners of the Republican 2011 Iowa Straw Poll, to the exclusion of the man who secured second place: Congressman Ron Paul.

Michele Bachmann won 4,823 votes; Texas Rep. Ron Paul 4,671. With 152 votes separating the two frontrunners, one might even say that, in Ames, Iowa, Paul jostled with Mrs. Bachmann for first place.

A slick Drew Griffin, also at CNN, cracked up as he instructed a cub reporter on the ground: “If you get a sound bite from Palin bring that back to us. You can hold the Ron Paul stuff.”

Following the Republican Poll, Politico.com ran an article about Paul, the caption to which read: “Ron Paul remains media poison.” The article featured an image of Ron Paul flanked by signs touting the stuff the press finds so poisonous: “Liberty and Freedom.”

As is often the case, satirist Jon Stewart stepped in to correct—and to make fun of—the farrago of misinformation spread by mainstream media. “Why are you treating Paul like he was the thirteenth floor in a hotel?” Stewart asked party operatives. Here Comedy Central cut to MSNBC’s Chuck Todd. On Meet the Press, Todd breezily announced his Republican top-tier contenders: Rick Perry, Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann.

A dude on Face the Nation did the same. The Perry, Romney, Bachmann trio was touted again by Brett Baer and Chris Wallace, both of Fox News.”Aren’t you forgetting an ideologically consistent congressman who came within 200 votes of winning the straw poll,” interjected a sarcastic Stewart. Another clip of Chris Wallace came up on Stewart’s screen.

For a moment, it looked as if Wallace was going to redeem himself: “We didn’t mention and we should,” he noodled. But no, it was “Rick Santorum” that the reporter went on to will from the political grave. Santorum “didn’t get half of what Ron Paul got,” the comedian apprised the nation. “He lost to the guy who lost so bad that he dropped out of the race.” (Tim Pawlenty) “Let’s not count out Jon Huntsman” said another no-name pack animal on CNN.

Huntsman got 69 votes. If all of Jon Huntsman’s supporters met at the Iowa Ames Quiznos, the fire marshal would say, ‘That’s fine; no problem.’ Huntsman was the only Mormon running in the straw poll, and he came in second among Mormons.

So Stewart spoofed the media. “This pretending Ron Paul doesn’t exist has been going on for weeks,” he said. [Make that decades.] Ron Paul “is Tea-Party Patient Zero. He’s the real deal.”Comedy Central followed with an effective demonstration of the disconnect between the arch-plotters on the panel of journalists, and the audience in Stephens Auditorium, in Ames, where a debate between the Republican rivals preceded the poll.

The people roared with approval when Ron Paul condemned America’s futile misadventures abroad. The journalists responded with a smirk and an eye roll. (And somewhere, someplace, a coquettish Ann Coulter lent a helping hand by simpering sexually over her candidate, Gov. Chris Christie.)

Yes, freedom frightens the establishment. Paul is airbrushed out of the political picture because, as he explained, his candidacy threatens the “status quo” with respect to welfare, warfare and monetary policies. Paul’s ideas are predicated on a return to reality. Paul the politician has been attempting to smash the parallel universe through which the congressional-media complex filters reality for the fools who keep falling for them. This implies reversing 100 years of fairy tales; deflating an empire built on funny money and military predation back to a republic based on private property and production.

As usual, Ron Paul has been too magnanimous about America’s media.

No matter their brand of political prostitution (Republican or Democrat), media talking heads are props to the politicos; they mirror the political class, reflecting and reinforcing the opinions—and the reality—among the elites they serve. More often than not, the chattering classes are as privileged and protected as their masters. These “Demopublican Monopolists” sense that as long as they sustain their respective constituencies, they will retain their perches and their sizable salaries.

But things are a changing. The country is changing. These B-rate minds are paddling as hard as they can to save sinecure. Even if it means not facing reality. When Standard & Poor’s downgraded America from its status as best AAA borrower, Louis Story of the New York Times was as anxious as GOP devotee Ann Coulter. Both suggested the State take action against the rating agency.

S&P signaled that as the US government loses prestige and power around the world, so too will its many tiers of top-dogs be downgraded. The statist men and women of the media are up the creek without a paddle.

More than anything they fear losing their status. Ron Paul makes these vainglorious individuals face reality when all they want is to save face.

On the day that a venerated American institution was preparing to bestow an award for transparency in government on President Barack Obama ̶ the domestic equivalent of the president’s Nobel peace prize, Charles Krauthammer called it ̶ members of our country’s media were accusing the Japanese government of secrecy. On that day, Neurotic Nation USA, egged on by the meltdown media, began hoarding Geiger counters and potassium iodide supplements as a protection against imaginary radiation plumes from Japan, wafting across 5000 miles of ocean.

Subtract 13 feet.

Eastern Japan is now 13 feet closer to North America, as a result of the tectonic-plate shift that caused an earthquake measuring 9 on the Richter scale, and a tidal wave that has pulverized Japan’s north-eastern coastal region. The quake has damaged reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex.

Our country’s edgy experts have ordered the evacuation of Americans in Japan within a 50-mile radius of the damaged reactors at Fukushima. Japan is being harangued to ape America. The Japanese have, so far, moved people from within a 20 km radius of the power plant. Funny that. The neurotic nation, whose military personnel in Japan are popping iodine pills if they’ve so much as flown over, or visited, the vicinity, expects the country that is fielding “The Fukushima 50” to do the same.

“The Fukushima 50” are volunteers from the Tokyo Electric Power Company. These men are working under near-impossible conditions at the problem power station to douse radioactive fires and spent nuclear rods, and to plug reactor containment vessels. As we say in the US, these men are taking a hit for the team.

Judging by their bombast, you’d think that our experts have been to the site at Fukushima. Indeed, Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, asserted that the water meant to cover and cool the spent fuel pool at the No. 4 reactor had evaporated, leaving the rods dangerously exposed. They were overheating, he declared from ground zero … at the House Energy and Commerce Committee panel in Washington.

“It’s way past Three Mile Island already,” crowed physicist Frank von Hippel. “The biggest risk now is that the core really melts down and you have a steam explosion.” Where exactly was Professor von Hippel situated when he issued his doom-laden predictions? At Princeton, New Jersey.

Jaczko’s Japanese counterparts have countered that they are on the verge of restoring electrical power to the Daiichi plant, and with it the ability to pump water over the sizzling, spent fuel.

Are the nuclear plants in japan working the way ours do in America? MSNBC’s Chris Matthews asked one of the many American specialists to shamelessly share his findings from afar. Hardball’s blowhard has a point. The USA’s stellar safety record ̶ the best in the world, perhaps ̶ is helped by the fact that we don’t have much of a nuclear power industry. Following the recommendations set out in the “China Syndrome,” a Hollywood dramatization of the incident at Three Mile Island, the construction of new reactors in the USA was practically halted. Nobody died in that 1979 accident in Pennsylvania. Nobody but the nuclear-power industry.

The chauvinism with which our ego-bound elites are treating The Japanese Other continued apace. After all, this genteel, able people do not qualify as members of an easy-to-patronize, protected group, the kind so valued in the US.

CNN’s rude Wolf Blitzer turned furiously on Ichiro Fujisaki, the Japanese ambassador to the US, in an interview that reminded me of the time the regal (Akio) Toyoda went up against the proverbial Torquemada, his tormentors on the US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. No words of condolence did Blitzer offer to the Japanese gentleman for the calamity his country and people had endured. Instead, he hammered Fujisaki about the possibility of “another Chernobyl” at the Daiichi power plant.

That one of the largest tremors in recorded history had left some 6 million Japanese households without electricity horrified Wolf. Where were Wolf and his network during the biggest windstorm to have hit Washington and Oregon in decades? In 2006, at least a million residents in the Pacific Northwest were stranded without power for days ̶ some for weeks ̶ in primitive conditions, befitting a Third World country. So too is Blitzer blissfully unaware that, with Katrina, the US government’s claim for high standards in a natural disaster was sundered forever.

At one stage, the bewildered Blitzer repeated, incredulously, “No looting? No looting; are you sure?” which is when a CNN Japanese foreign correspondent took the opportunity to educate this insular American. Japan was relatively crime-free. If you lose your wallet, you’ll likely find it at the nearest police station. People pull together here, yet are propelled forward by individual agency and initiative, she explained proudly.

But that was hardly a journalistic angle worth pursuing. For to grasp the reason this homogenous society’s culture has endured, one would have to juxtapose it with balkanized America, a country riven by feuds and factions courtesy of state-imposed tribalism (multiculturalism and mass immigration). Far better to crank things up by pursuing the partial meltdown, full meltdown, or core meltdown, angle in Japan.

Most members of the meltdown media have been schooled in activism, not in journalism. To them, every news story becomes, reflexively, a cause; a reason to “educate” and promote “awareness,” rather than to report the facts. That so many of our news outlets settled on identical front-page, or pixelated, ledes is unsettling.

As a consequence of this pervading group-think, we have not seen nearly enough of how impressively the Japanese people are coping; how calm and courageous they appear in interviews. When CNN’s international correspondent alluded to “scenes of hardship,” the camera cut to a shelter. The images were heartbreaking, to be sure. But, unlike those taken during Katrina, there was much to inspire in Japan. One saw rows of neatly laid-out mats. The elderly had been snugly tucked in clean blankets. Kids, faces covered with masks, were sweeping the floors industriously.

In other footage, lines of people snaked around the neighborhood, waiting patiently, sometimes for days, to purchase food and water. The individuals interviewed were grief-struck, but they held it together. Nobody was screaming for government aid. There has been no menace or murder on what remains of the streets of Sendai city.

Accustomed as I am to seeing abreacting Americans or unhinged Haitians, these sights astounded me. My heroes have always been in the Greek tradition. This makes the silent, stoic, refined Japanese my heroes.

Japan will be okay. It is a highly civilized, advanced society.

Romanticism is man’s revolt against reason,” wrote the great classical liberal economist Ludwig von Mises. Minds ravaged by the rot of romanticism were everywhere on display in mainstream media’s coverage of the revolt that began in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, and swept the Egyptian President, Mohamed Husni Mubarak, from office.

I’ve finally figured out what it was that repulsed me so about American opinion makers’ slobbering response to this anti- authoritarian upheaval.

It was not so much that the media ignored the likely possibility that democracy in a country that has become progressively more Islamic since the 1950s might not have a happy ending.

It was not that the media pretended that the Muslim Brotherhood, also the “best organized opposition force in the country,” would not field a viable presidential candidate.

It was not that, in their jubilation, Anderson Cooper (CNN), Neil Cavuto (Fox News), and Christiane Amanpour (ABC) failed to mention the precedent set in Lebanon, where Hezbollah has deployed the democratic process to get the better of the country’s Maronite Christians.

It was not even the fact that the journalistic imperative to provide nuance, detail, and an economic and historic backdrop to the unfolding events was replaced, by the journalistic jet-set, with the telegenic drama of the man on the street.

None of this bothered me as much as the patronizing position these American reporters adopted; the neat bifurcation they managed to maintain between “Us” (the “free” men and women of America) and “Them” (those pathetic, shackled Egyptians).

The fact is that the heroic movement for democracy in Egypt dovetails with an ongoing flirtation with fascism in the US; the twilight of individual sovereignty in the US contrasts with its rise in Egypt.

So it was that America’s intellectual “Idiocracy” pontificated about the obvious need for liberty in Egypt, as its political masters worked to refine Mubarak’s methods. No sooner had Mubarak pulled the switch on the internet, than Sen. Susan Collins, the Republican ranking member on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, re-introduced a bill designed to give Obama similar internet-killing powers. All under the cover of democracy.

Foolish reporters fulminated about Egyptian freedoms, but hardly flinched when a Republican-led House of Representatives extended certain provisions of the Patriot Act. All the better to help the home-grown terrorists of the TSA to obliterate those pesky Fourth-Amendment rights.

The same intrepid reporters failed to mention that, when he was not ordering rendition and torture in the service of the US, Mubarak’s dictatorial powers were directed, unjustly indubitably, against the Islamic fundamentalists of the Muslim brotherhood.

American justice, on the other hand, proceeds boldly against … tokers, seven hundred and fifty thousand of whom languish in our prisons. By Wikipedia estimates, “The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world.” By logical extension, the US imprisons more individuals than Mubarak did, millions of who are innocent (arrested for behavior that is licit in natural law). According to “420Magazine,” “Approximately 4 million Americans are arrested each year for victimless crimes.”

According to the CIA World Fact Book, Egyptian unemployment hovers around 9.7 percent. How different is that from American jobless rates? The Egyptian government’s debt is 80.5 percent of GDP (an admittedly iffy measure of economic Brownian Motion, or expenditure). At $14.13 trillion, the debt our government has incurred stands at 96.4 percent of GDP.

For a while, the gilded elites had reason to worry. The natives were growing restless over being manhandled at the nation’s federally controlled airports. But American travelers soon relaxed, and turned, instead — and with a vengeance — on a freedom fighter: WikiLeaks proprietor Julian Assange.

Genghis Bush lied us into war in Iraq, causing the direct and indirect deaths of 108,864 Iraqi civilians and of 4436 (mostly working-class) American men. At least 32,977 of our soldiers were maimed and disfigured for life in that escapade. Most Americans were as upbeat about the carnage as comedian Dennis Miller still is.

Tame tea-partiers (who were easily cowed when called racists) excepted, Americans last took to the streets in the 1960s, during the Vietnam War protests.

American media seem to color events by refracting them through a sickeningly sentimental prism. Their efforts to create reality on the ground — instead of reporting on it — notwithstanding, here’s what we know about the inchoate Egyptian uprising: the movement’s members hated their ruler and did what was necessary to be rid of him.

Egyptians united in non-partisan detestation of their dictator. Whereas the Egyptians held no delusions about their top dog; we in the US lionize ours, mistaking political overlords for benefactors.

The 2010 midterm elections were a bloodbath for the Democratic Party. Because there are no mollifying messages to be had from such a political massacre, liberal pols, pundits, and other dominant interests, hastened to soften the “shellacking” by framing it in terms more tolerable.

As they tell it, a gain of more than 60 seats in the House ─ “the biggest party turnover since 1948,” in Ann Coulter’s assessment ─ was no more than a howl for compromise, civility, and bipartisanship. Obama failed to deliver all sweetness and light, as he had promised in 2008. When Americans finally unfurled from the fetal position, they voted to protest the incivility that had deformed the political discourse they hold so dear. Pretty much.

Here’s how Harry Reid rendered this historic election:

“The message that voters throughout Nevada and all across the nation sent to Washington is that they want Democrats, Republicans and Independents to work together to find the common ground needed for real solutions and real progress. … The time for politics is now over. And now that Republicans have more members in both houses of Congress, they must take their responsibility to present bipartisan solutions more seriously.”

Considered “Washington’s most highly regarded columnist’ by both editorial-page editors and members of Congress,” the banal David Broder seconded Reid: “Instead of cooperation, the worst kind of partisanship returned. And instead of changing the way Washington operated, [Obama] seemed to ratify business as usual.” You just know that The John and the mindless schoolmarm of CNN’s “Parker/Spitzer” are agreed.

You heard it from the “Dude” himself (which is how liberal comedians refer to Da Main Man):

“You know, a little over a month ago,” intoned Obama, “we held a town hall meeting in Richmond, Virginia. And one of the most telling questions came from a small business owner who runs a tree care firm. He told me how hard he works and how busy he was; how he doesn’t have time to pay attention to all the back-and-forth in Washington. And he asked, is there hope for us returning to civility in our discourse, to a healthy legislative process.”

The president’s sample businessman omitted the effects of the hulking health-care overhaul on his tree-care enterprise because these were as nothing compared to the discomfort discordant politics have caused him. I knew that.

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews has more street cred than most. The host of “Hardball” spent the first two years of the Obama presidency in a state of delirium bordering on the sexual. Famous for experiencing something akin to a (daytime) nocturnal emission during Obama’s coronation — “thrill up the leg” Matthews called the incident — Chris later begged Barack to be his “Enforcer,” in the matter of sacking Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Understand: when a liberal like the president shows a bit of that manly magic, “girlie boys” like Chris get giddy.

Given Chris’s well-known carnal affections for Barack Obama, it is unfortunate that the op-ed segment with which he ends the “Hardball” program daily is called “Let Me Finish.” Yesterday, Matthews finished-off by surmising that the “kick in the pants” the president has sustained means that it was now up to Obama to make the Republicans an offer they could not refuse ─ especially with the entire country watching. The challenge for Obama, advised Matthews, is to force Republicans to join him, or look like creeps if they fail to join him.

Chris arrived at his version of the bipartisanship lesson from a different position or angle. But then he is “special.”

Democrats concede that other considerations compounded the electorate’s inconsolable sorrow over America’s impolite politics. They, the Democrats, had been ineffectual in finessing Fabian policies; they did not communicate these well. And, the economic doldrums distracted from the president’s obligation to take “a series of very tough decisions, but decisions that were right,” as he put it.

The blessings of such “sound” initiatives ─ stimulus, bailout, nationalization, cap-and-trade, a moratorium on energy extraction in the Gulf, more war in Afghanistan; and on Arizona, commanding a green-energy economy, a $3,039,000,000,000 addition to the national debt, and massive monetary quantitative easing to facilitate it, on and on ─ were not helped by a factor highlighted repeatedly by the MSNBC broadcasters. When all is said and done, Tea Party America was a bunch of “stump-toothed Appalachian mountain men.”

In other words, spectacularly stupid (and venal to boot).

Traditionally, as this column has quipped, the Democratic and Republican parties have each operated as counterweights in a partnership designed to keep the pendulum of power swinging in perpetuity from the one entity to the other. As my fellow libertarian Vox Day has observed, no sooner do the Republicans come to power, than they move to the left. When they get their turn, Democrats shuffle to the right. At some point, I predict, John McCain will reach across the aisle and the creeps will converge.

Yes, “reaching across the aisle to get things done” is a euphemism for relinquishing principle in favor of political pragmatism. Barack Obama, Harry Reid, David S. Broder, Chris Matthews ─ you heard it straight from the donkey’s mouth.

Thus, to paraphrase one hardcore tea partier’s fighting words, the only time you want your representative to reach across the aisle is to grab a Democrat or an errant Republican by the throat.

“Expectations tend to be self-fulfilling,” said an anonymous wag. Expect nothing and you’ll get nothing. Except very little and that’s all you’ll get. In modern-day USA, a kid so much as dials 911 in an emergency, and he is decorated for bravery. And if an African-American rejects her birthright, and demonstrates less prejudice toward whites ─ she is up for beatification.

Repudiate this elevated ethical standard, and a deranged, fulminating Keith Olbermann will pelt you with a panegyric on the imagined martyrdom of one Shirley Sherrod, now the most celebrated public servant in the United States, and perhaps the world.

Ms. Sherrod’s road to sainthood is not that unusual. In this woman we have, indubitably, one among an army of fairly typical black state employees. In this case, working for the rural development division of the United States Department of Agriculture.

Sherrod got into trouble over an address delivered at the twentieth annual freedom banquet of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (whose raison d’être is racial), on March the 27th. (Standards of journalism are not as “big” as Andrew Breitbart’s “big this; big that” websites: the reports don’t say in what year the speech was given.)

Olbermann is a crude pamphleteer who imagines himself a modern-day Emile Zola. Most recently, the anchor has sunk to the level of fraud and falsehood in comparing Ms. Sherrod ─ a contemporary black woman, who has, hitherto, enjoyed safe and secure sinecure in liberal, post-Civil-Rights-Act America ─ to Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a 19th-Jew living in illiberal France, falsely accused of the worst military breach possible.

The similarities are as startling as Olbermann’s leveling logic. In 1894, this patriotic Frenchman was charged with spying for the Germans. Dreyfus was tried and convicted of treason with no due process of the law. He was sentenced to a lifetime on Devil’s Island, a penal colony in South America. There, Dreyfus languished until 1899. Outraged at the miscarriage of justice, French writer Emile Zola penned a stirring tract, “J’Accuse,” in defense of Dreyfus, who was eventually exonerated 12 years after his ordeal began.

Dreyfus’s fate clearly mirrors that of Sherrod. Especially glaring are the parallels between Sherrod’s 48-hour, celebratory ride on the cable news merry-go-round, and Dreyfus’s four-year romp around Treasure Island, in French Guiana.

We’ve “pulled a Dreyfus on Sherrod,” foamed old Olby. Sherrod “has been to her own Devil’s Island,” “thanks to the perpetual fraud machine that is Fox News, and the scum that is this assassin [Andrew] Breitbart,” and “the howling fools of the far right, the stand-aside pathetic bureaucrats of the Department of Agriculture, the whole of the cowering media, this network [his] included, the whole of the government,” and the president.

Look, Mr. Olbermann: You are no Emile Zola. You don’t even rise to the level of the kings and queen of Kvetch TV, John and Larry King and Anderson Cooper of CNN. And Sherrod is no Dreyfus. She was fired by an administration that mistook her for a worse racist than she actually was. The Obama posse overestimated the extent of Sherrod’s animus for whites. She turned out to be merely a mezzanine-level racist.

Neither is Sherrod’s story one of “redemption and cross-racial friendship,” as Newsweek put it slightly less hyperbolically than did MSNBC’s front man. Shirley Sherrod’s is a tale of the triumph of low expectations and black racial exculpation in contemporary America.

Here is a USDA worker, whose pay and perks are provided by wealthier Americans ─ given that this country has the steepest, most progressive tax system among all OECD countries.* Yet she disdains the very “haves” who’ve funded her existence and facilitated her “life’s work.” By her own admission, Sherrod arrived each day at work eager to toil for the betterment of nobody but blacks.

One day, as she told the NAACP gathering, God put things in her path that made her realize she was there for poor people. A white farmer appealed for her assistance. Had the white farmer been a brother forced to beg before a sister in a position of power, Sherrod might have characterized him as a proud man in humiliating circumstances. Given the desperate farmer’s hue, Sherrod alleged he had a superior attitude, before going on to describe her dilemma: having to help a white man save his property, when so many black people had lost theirs.”

So, I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do,” Sherrod smirked. “I did enough. I took him to a white lawyer; one of them; to his own kind.”Drum roll for Ms. Sherrod, who then followed up thus: “That’s when it was revealed to me that this was about poor vs. those who have. And not so much about white—it is about white and black—but it opened my eyes …”

Hallelujah, and what a pure heart!

A nice enough lady, Ms. Sherrod then divulged how she performed the tasks (the rich had paid her to do) even when it came to this dejected white farmer. The acme of ethics in American: a black woman who has graduated from hard-core to soft bigotry.

From the howling wilderness that is his moral universe, Brother Olbermann has demanded that we, first, flagellate and, next, accept Shirley Sherrod as the embodiment of “the kind of true greatness the rest of us can only hope we might express for one moment in the whole of our lives.”

I don’t think so.

* OECD: Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development

Eugene Terre’Blanche, leader of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB) that seeks the establishment of a homeland for the Afrikaners of South Africa, was alone at his homestead over the Easter period, when two farmhands bludgeoned the sixty-nine-year-old separatist to a pulp with pangas and pipes. Based on hearsay ─ and their abiding sympathy for savages ─ news media across the West are insisting that the motive for the murder was a “labor dispute.”

This, the oleaginous officials of the African National Congress (Mandela’s gang) must just love; they share with their admirers in the West a determination to ignore (and perhaps to encourage) the black onslaught against white South African farmers, or Boers (who happen to feed the Continent). Those of us who’ve been studying the systematic, race-based extermination of farming South Africa know too well the telltale signs of a farm murder. Without exception, Mr. Terre’Blanche and all 3149 farmers murdered since “freedom” were slaughtered in ways that would do Shaka Zulu proud. 

The brutality of the racially motivated murders of white farmers in South Africa, and, increasingly, of whites in general, is one aspect of these crimes. Mr. Terre’Blanche was unrecognizable. Two weeks before he was slaughtered, seventeen-year-old Anika Smit was raped, her throat slashed sixteen times and her hands hacked off and removed from the scene.

Both acts of butchery were unremarkable in Mandela’s South Africa.

The dehumanization of the victim ─ Crimen injuria in South African law ─ is another feature of these feral acts. When they were finished with him, Terre’Blanche’s killers pulled down the old man’s pants, exposing his privates. Slain white farmers are often displayed like trophies by their black killers.

Mr. Terre’Blanche was a victim of a farm murder, plain and simple. 

Afrikaner farmers are being exterminated at the genocidal annual rate of 313 per 100,000 inhabitants. Or, in the estimation of Dr. Gregory H. Stanton who heads “Genocide Watch,” “four times as high as is for the rest of the population,” making farming in South Africa the most dangerous occupation in the world. (Miners, by comparison, suffer 27.8 fatalities per 100,000 workers.)

Mr. Terre’Blanche’s killers, who crept up on him in his sleep, were being hailed as heroes by black groups outside the Ventersdorp courthouse in which they appeared (in a part of South Africa now known as the North West Province), and beyond. Just in case her readers forgot who here was on the side of the angels, the Associated Press’ pack animal Michelle Faul gave them a history lesson peppered with politically correct pieties. She wrote:

“Blacks outside the courthouse were singing … songs from the struggle for majority rule that finally came in 1994 after years of state-sponsored violence by the white minority regime and urban guerrilla warfare waged by the African National Congress.”

As Ms. Faul tells it, the white crowd, there to protest (gasp) the slaying of Mr. Terre’Blanche, was singing (horrors) “the apartheid-era anthem in the Afrikaans language.” As hard as it is for stupid Westerners to believe, there was life before black majority rule. The white minority settled the tip of the African continent around the same time Americans settled this one. Like their American coreligionists, the puritans of South Africa built the country currently being dismantled by the black majority. And, lo ─ they had a national life and an anthem: Die Stem

Here’s a verse of that old “hate speech”:

In the golden warmth of summer, In the chill of winter’s air, In the surging life of springtime, In the autumn of despair; When the wedding bells are chiming, Or when those we love depart, Thou dost know us for thy children And dost take us to thy heart. Loudly peals the answering chorus; We are thine, and we shall stand, Be it life or death, to answer Thy call, beloved land.

Die Stem is a paean to God and country, and rather beautiful at that. Western journalists hunt in packs.

The AP is only aping the ANC, according to which the old anthem is unsavory, but not the hit jingle, “Kill The Boer; Kill the Farmer.” For it, says the ANC, does no more than pay homage to the Party’s illustrious history. (Agreed: incitement to murder is a fitting ANC anthem.)

In the “New South Africa,” there is indeed a renewed appreciation for this old slogan, chanted at political rallies and funerals during “The Struggle” (against apartheid). The riff has been revived by ANC Youth League president Julius Malema, who stomps around the country calling for Boer scalps at every opportunity. (Malema has lived most of his life under black rule.)

Variants of “Kill the Boer” have hit the social networking site Facebook. At the time Anika was taken, the country had been embroiled in a debate about posts that appeared under the name of Malema. One entry called on “fellow black people” to “take [their] land,” and “rape every trespasser, namely white whores … till the last breath is out. … White kids will be burned, especially those in Pretoria and Vrystaat.”

Anika, an Afrikaner, was from Pretoria.

Popularized by Mandela’s men, and sung by The Man himself, the AP considers an exhortation to kill whites nothing but an “anti-apartheid song.” Liberation lyrics.

Mantras and chants have a mesmerizing, often murderous, power in African life. The West’s malpracticing and mindless media (liberal and, sadly, “conservative” alike) have forgotten this. In its hypnotic hold on the popular imagination, “Kill the Boer; Kill the Farmer” is not unlike the “Kill them before they kill you” catch phrase that helped excite Hutus to massacre half a million of their Tutsi neighbors, whom they had dehumanized first by dubbing as “inyenzi” (“cockroaches”).

Of course, banning an incitement to murder will do nothing to excise a dark reality embedded deep in the human heart.

©2010 By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
April 9

As I write, I scour the CNN website, in vain, for news that broke hours ago on Fox:

A Haitian judge would be ordering the release of 10 American missionaries who were arrested for taking 33 children and trying to transport them out of the country.

Hours on, CNN, which had followed the story to the exclusion of more urgent items ─ and is generally quick to break news ─ had informed its internet followers only that Haitians had canceled Carnival.

Mercifully, CNN doesn’t engage in straightforward editorializing. The Kvetch channel’s unadulterated leftism — not to mention hard-core statism — creeps into reports by way of story selection, slant, energetic facial grimacing, and punishing programs such “Black, Brown, and plain Bored in America.” (Where whites are concerned, it’s an existential whiteout.)

Call it the CNN meta-message.

The tough tenor toward the missionaries from Central Valley Baptist Church in Meridian, Idaho, was set by CNN alpha female, Anderson Cooper. The activist anchor and his houseboys in Haiti had been exceedingly hard on the hapless group, whose aim it was to, first, whisk the children to the Dominican Republic, and, next, help “each child find healing, hope, joy and new life in Christ,” as well as “opportunities for adoption into a loving Christian family.”

This mission statement ─ Christianity in practice, if you will ─ was scorned by the New York Times too. The paper accused the evangelicals of “trying to buy souls,” and pronounced them “guilty of a kind of spiritual trafficking, by mixing the help they offer to victims of last month’s earthquake with proselytizing.”

A derelict that defaults on a loan or incurs bad debt has the slobbering sympathies of Cooper and company. Not these unworldly Christians. AC was quick to dig-up and run stories about Laura Silsby, the team’s representative, detailing her chaotic financial affairs. “The Americans lied” was an oft-repeated Cooper refrain. (The jet-setting journalist has never, as far as I know, protested the practice of taqiyya, or lying for Islam).

Thankfully ─ and contrary to CNN’s self-styled newsman-cum-humanitarian ─ one Haitian justice was not as eager to see “The Americans” go down for their goodness. As Reuters reported, the (eminently reasonable) investigating Haitian judge looked for criminal intent in his investigation. He found none. So the Haitian justice concluded that the incarcerated missionaries acted with no malice aforethought.

Mens rea: now that’s a difficult concept for Cooper to comprehend.

In fairness, Anderson is not working with much. He suffers from what Peter Brimelow, editor of VDARE.COM, has termed intellectual inertia. It infects most mainstream journalists. Put less politely, Anderson’s stupid. How is he to know that a legal burden must be met before a manifestly ludicrous prosecution proceeds? Hopefully, a Haitian justice has taught Anderson a legal lesson (and some humility).

“The study of primitive societies refutes the notion that all men are brothers, and that all men are equal,” wrote Russell Kirk in “The Conservative Mind.” Had he stopped to “dig deeper” ─ the title of a segment on the Cooper nightly “weep-a-thon”─ instead of force-feeding his worldview to his viewers, Anderson might have discovered that the 33 boys and girls, most of whom hailed from the village of Calebasse, adjacent to Port-au-Prince, had been handed-over by parents and other guardians, willingly.

The likes of Cooper foist their own politically proper, psychologically palatable perspective on the objects of their pity. Ditto Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post. The WaPo editor projected his American parenting preferences onto the villagers of Calebasse, declaring that, “Giving up a son or daughter is one of the most wrenching decisions a parent can face, and it has to be done right.” The paternalistic Brother Robinson here implies that the Haitian villagers could not have possibly done the surrendering “right.”

As incomprehensible as this may be to insular, insulated Americans, thousands of Haitian children are sold into slavery each year. Yes, the former slave colony has kept the tradition alive. Child chattel still thrives in Haiti in the form of the “Restavec system.” Children are kept in grinding poverty and worked to the bone, sold, or given away to their owners by parents and guardians. Unheard of in the US; in Haiti, owning a Restavek is a status symbol; being rid of a burdensome child, often a relief.

There are approximately 300,000 restaveks─ almost ten percent of Haiti’s children have been sold into servitude by the formative figures in their little lives. Haiti is “a piece of Africa transported to the new world.” If lucky, in this the poorest country in the Americas, a child can look forward to subsisting on $2 a day ─ For that is Haitian GDP per capita. If unlucky, she may be sold into sexual and domestic servitude.

Her foibles and frailties notwithstanding, Laura Silsby ─ backed by the Rev. Clint Henry and his 500-member, Idaho-based, Baptist Church ─ is probably the best thing that’ll ever happen to these waifs. Whatever were Sillby’s plans for the children, these were far and away better than what’s in store for them if they remain at home.

Mind you, the kids can hope to be caught on camera ─ Anderson Cooper’s ─ as they chase him and his crew begging for tasty morsels, while Cooper flexes his muscles, furrows his forehead, and shows just how much he feels their pain.

Postscript: As I put this column to bed, CNN.com finally reported that a “Haiti judge may rule in Americans’ case.” Could the network still be holding out for a conviction?

Oblivious to the cameras ─ or perhaps for them ─ Amanda Knox (22) and Raffaele Sollecito (25) exchanged a slow, sensual kiss in full view of world media. Not far from where the two kissed lay the body of Meredith Kercher, the English girl with whom Knox had shared student accommodation in Perugia, Italy. Her throat slit, Meredith had expired in slow agony.

The kinky canoodling of Knox and her paramour outside the house of horrors conjured the climactic moment in the film noir “The Comfort of Strangers.”

Christopher Walken and Helen Mirren play an older couple (Robert and Caroline) who live in a palazzo in Venice. They gain the trust of the vacationing Mary and Colin (played by the late Natasha Richardson and Rupert Everett), a young English couple. As Colin sips a cocktail with Robert at the latter’s Venetian residence, Robert suddenly and swiftly (as planned) moves to cut Colin’s throat. He then steps over his gurgling victim and the gushing blood to engage in frenzied sex with his eager wife Caroline.

The two have fulfilled a shared fantasy.

“Some time during the night,” by the Times of London’s telling, “the couple had returned to the cottage and faked a burglary in the room of another housemate. But as the police picked through the broken glass they were told that nothing had been stolen. They would have left it at that had not the housemate asked insistently why the door to Kercher’s room was locked shut. Eventually, it was knocked down. Kercher lay virtually naked on the floor, her two cotton tops rolled up above her chest. Oddly, her body was partly covered by a beige quilt” [the telltale signature of a female perpetrator, as a behavioral analyst would subsequently explain].

Knox, Sollecito and Rudy Guede, a local drifter born in the Ivory Coast and known to Knox, were convicted of the murder and sexual assault of Kercher. CNN, Fox News, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, on and on ─ all have united in advocating for Amanda, “An Innocent Abroad.”

Going against the grain of American-style boosterism, Barbie Nadeau of Newsweek stuck with “journalism” to detail the ample evidence against the pair, downplayed or downright suppressed in the American media. For one, “Neither suspect [had] a credible alibi for the night of the murder, and both told a variety of lies about that night.” Knox changed her alibi, not once or twice, but several times. In the process, she accused Patrick Lumumba, a Congolese bar owner, of the crime. Based on the convincing yarn Knox spun, Lumumba spent time in jail before being released.

After Knox had cast her pal Lumumba aside, she tried to implicate her lover of two weeks, venturing: “I think it is possible Raffaele went to Meredith’s house, raped her, then killed her and then when he got home, while I was sleeping, he pressed my fingerprints on the knife.

“[C]redible witnesses had shattered Sollecito’s alibi for the night of the murder. Sollecito says he was home that night working on his computer, but specialists … testified that his computer was dormant for an eight-hour period the night of Kercher’s murder.”

“Theatrics aside,” wrote Newsweek’s Nadeau, “the Amanda Knox trial comes down to forensics. … Among the most damning evidence against Sollecito is his DNA on the metal clasp of the bra that was cut from Kercher after she died.”

Also revealed with Luminol was a bloody footprint at the crime scene that matched Sollecito’s. “Key forensic evidence against Knox includes her footprint in blood in the hallway outside Kercher’s room. There [were] also mixed traces of Knox’s DNA and Kercher’s blood on the fixtures in the bathroom the girls shared. And a knife was found in Sollecito’s apartment with Knox’s DNA on the handle and … Kercher’s DNA in a groove on the blade.”

Like the original “Dream Team,” defense attorneys for Knox, “who at one time admitted to being at home when the murder took place,” alleged contamination (even though the crime scene was sealed off in-between searches), character assassination and insufficient amounts of DNA (it’s the type of DNA that matters, not the amount).

Knox’s vocal and voluminous supporters stateside yelped anti-Americanism and a general Italian backwardness. Amanda had been deprived of due process, they said. In American (positive) law, procedural violations can get evidence of guilt — a bloodied knife or a smoking gun — barred from being presented at trial. More often than not, such procedural defaults are used to suppress immutable physical facts, thus serving to subvert the spirit of the (natural) law and justice.

After attempting in vain to implicate Lumumba and the hapless Sollecito, Knox went on to scream police brutality, claiming she had been coerced into incriminating admissions. Knox was asked to identify the female officer whom she accused of slapping her during the interrogation, upon which she fell silent.

When the guilty verdict came down, a procession of fulminating female talkers soon convened on CNN to rubbish Italy’s legal system: The evidence (cited above) was weak, or practically non-existent. The prosecutor and the Italian jury were provincial bumpkins incapable of properly appreciating a high-spirited American. And so on and so forth.

In Italy, “if you’re accused, you’re as good as guilty,” asserted Judy Bachrach of Vanity (un)Fair. Bachrach was joined in ugly displays of American chauvinism by the likes of Lisa Bloom (spawned by ambulance-chasing attorney Gloria Allred) and the scary Stacey Honowitz. The two soon backed down somewhat, Bloom later admitting, on Anderson Cooper 360°, that indeed Knox’s confession, her “damaging behavior” following the murder, as well as the blood evidence, would be enough to bring down a conviction in our hallowed legal system.

The Knox clan has since recruited a veritable media mafia to put the Italian judicial system on trial for railroading their cherub. Agitating for Amanda are Secretary Hilary Clinton, Senator Maria Cantwell (WA), King County Superior Court Judge Michael Heavey, ubiquitous tele-attorney Anne Bremner, public relations advisor David Marriott, and “48 Hours” correspondent Peter Van Sant, who has abandoned impartiality for outright advocacy.

©2009 By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
December 11