Liberal Media Gloated About Suspicions That Hilary's Concussion Wasn't a Concussion; Now Clam Up

There used to be a time when the media was willing to entertain the possibility that Democratic politicians were lying, or at least fudging the truth. We all know that when someone quits office "to spend more time with his family," he was fired, for example.

The conservative media expressed skepticism about Hillary Clinton's concussion-by-falling, wondering if there wasn't more to the story -- like her attempting to evade testifying about Benghazi. (Which they've also decided we should express no skepticism about!)

The liberal media pounced -- because its role is no longer to question Democratic political authorities, or express any skepticism whatsoever about their claims, but to act as their Public Relations arm simply claim that everything a Democrat says is true -- "from a certain point of view," as Obi Wan might say. See, for example, this digest of the most egregious "fact checks" of 2012, where true claims made by Republicans are deemed false, because the liberal "fact" checkers don't like the implications made, and where false claims made by Democrats (especially Obama) are deemed "true," because, well. Let them explain.

Much of our method of flattering ourselves is by favorable comparison to others -- to look at others, deem what others do "bad," "stupid," or "crazy," and set ourselves up in opposition to that, thus reassuring ourselves that we are good, smart, and reasonable.

Apart from the surface-level bias at play -- the obvious intellectual dishonesty, where "fact" checkers invent the category of "true but false" for Republicans and "false but true" for Democrats -- there is a deeper, psychologically rooted bias at play. Because conservatives have been so "Otherized" by liberals, and so then because virtually anything a conservative does is definitionally bad, stupid, or crazy, a liberal insecure in his status or his intellectual ability engages in an unwitting game of Let Me Take the Exact Opposite Position and by so Reflexively Doing, Prove My Worthiness.

Thus, when a conservative expresses skepticism, the intellectually-insecure liberal must vehemently take the position of absolute guilelessness, absolute credulity. If a conservative doubts the word of a liberal politician, the insecure liberal demonstrates how rational he is by assuming -- nay, insisting-- that everything a liberal politician tells him is 100% true.

In an effort, then, to define themselves against the Other, they have taken an unfortunate tendency of the out-party to engage in conspiracy-theorizing (as the left engaged in under George W. Bush, by the way) and made themselves into reflexive skeptics against the skeptics, or, more accurately, reflexive paranoids against the ostensibly paranoid.

But this puts them in a remarkable, risible position, far more incredible and lunatic than any position they're seeking to define themselves against:
postulating, incredibly, that there is an alien species upon the earth, a species which looks human but in fact is otherworldly, and which simply does not have the human capacity for deception or self-dealing behavior, and this strange absolutely-ethically-pure alien species is commonly known as "Liberal Politicians."

Is the conservative paranoia about Obama being a Manchurian candidate with malice in his heart excessive and unhinged? Perhaps. But is the liberal reverse paranoia -- what is the word? -- that Obama is constitutionally incapable of selfishness, deception, and self-dealing any more reasonable?

It is in fact less reasonable: For we know many humans who are in fact selfish and dishonest, but we know of not a single person still living on earth who is by definiton incapable of either sin, to the point where, as their claims carry them, to simply question Obama's, or Hillary''s honesty is to give evidence of a form of mania.

What a remarkable transformation of liberal views on the ethics with which political power is exercised -- just 5-6 years ago they considered the theory that the American President had deliberately permitted the murder of 3000 citizens in order to secure a short-term political advantage a theory which, while unproven, was no strong mark against its proponent, to a new theory, upon the Apotheosis of Barack Hussein Obama, that the American President and his lesser ministers have simply not told a single untruth in their lives and to suspect them of doing so is a mark of lunacy.

Jim Treacher responds to those toadies who now claim, preposterously, that a liberal politician's word is always presumptively true in all details. And I see this admission of this counter-lunacy -- liberals attempting to knock down what they take as the lunacies of the right by postulating even greater lunacies -- in in the Washington Post.

Head injuries are no joke, but the backlash against those who initially questioned whether Hillary Clinton’s concussion was for real seems like an overreaction, too; you don’t have to be hateful to have wondered if she really had the flu and fell down right before she was supposed to testify about the security situation at our consulate that was really just a house in Benghazi, Libya, where four Americans were killed by terrorists in September.

After all, public officials are routinely less than forthcoming about their health, even if we do know more now than we did when Edith Wilson was secretly running the country after her husband Woodrow’s stroke. Or when the public was protected from the sight of FDR’s wheelchair. Or when John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign flatly denied perfectly accurate, LBJ-inspired reports that JFK suffered from Addison’s disease.

...

I also can’t get too outraged by the early skepticism that Hillary had a blood clot in her brain yet was also doing just great because those two reports don’t seem to mesh. The latter certainly didn’t match the expression of worry on her daughter Chelsea’s face as she left the New York hospital where the secretary of state was admitted on Sunday.

And finally, it isn’t as though Clinton has never shaded a fact in her 65 years....
[W]ithout dragging the ancient White House travel office scandal or the Rose Law Firm into this century, she’s still the same person who repeatedly described coming under fire on a runway in Bosnia. During her ’08 campaign, she was eventually forced to apologize for saying, ”I remember landing under sniper fire,” in Tuzla back in 1996. “There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.” That never happened, though the greeting ceremony did.

She also points out that many of the exact same liberal fans of Hillary's, who give her such props for the Machiavellian play of letting Susan Rice destroy her career by carrying the false Benghazi claims to market, while she herself had other Duties Unspecified, are the same people who now insist that the girl just don't have a devious bone in her body, and anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is a stone-cold nutter.

That's all level-headed enough. I find it strange at this point in human history -- when so much of it has been recorded and is so easily available to us, as are whole volumes about human behavior and our basically selfish impulses -- it has to be seriously contended, as a contrarian point of view, that yes, human beings tend to lie, and politicians tend to lie especially.

Even the Democrats, if you can believe such blasphemous words.

This, in the Age of Obama, is counted as a controversial point. I have to cite a Washington Post blogger admiringly for noting this for the record. We're actually debating this proposition right now.

So that's where we are.

This is a dangerous moment. I keep saying this, but I do think Tyranny is in the air. When the press decides that our Dear Leaders are above suspicion, and any suspicion is evidence of both mental illness and treason simultaneously, we're living on the cusp of Chavez-like times.

Dear Self-Proclaimed Rationalists/Empiricists,

You're doing it wrong. Please note this for your records.

Respectfully,

People Who Would Like To Know What's In the Kool-Aid,
Before We Drink It,
If That's Quite All Right By You

posted by Ace at 06:25 PM

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