Calling all Super Sleuths: Are you a good enough detective to solve this Mainstream Media news mystery?; Kathleen Parker and the Miami Herald's longstanding lack of columnist diversity

Calling all Super Sleuths: Are you a good enough detective to solve this Mainstream Media news mystery?; Kathleen Parker and the Miami Herald's longstanding lack of columnist diversity

If you saw the following five headlines in print or online, what would be your first guess as to what you'd just come across?

Mitt’s convention speech -In his own words. Well, almost.

Santorum’s failed pander - A false and snobbish attack on the president.

Out-of-touch Republicans - Romney and Santorum’s struggles bode ill for GOP.

Santorum’s war against elites - Campaigning with a chip on his shoulder.

Pushing Michigan away - Why the GOP won’t win the state in November.

What would be your guess for the source of this rather limited political perspective?

a.) A subscriber-only website for wealthy Democratic bundlers, all of whom are members in good standing of "Friends of O"?

b.) A college newspaper of a mid-sized Liberal Arts college in Ohio, with lots of high-minded, moralistic and incurious young women columnists who never attend their own school's home football or basketball games, and who aim to fit right in at some large East Coast newspaper, and just so they leave no doubt about where their political allegiances lie, they make sure they're right there in black & white.

c.) A special preview of the forthcoming print version of the monthly KosKooks4America comic book that will be bankrolled by George Soros?

d.) Your own local area's weekly VillageVoice-owned free newspaper that runs all those escort ads in the back, which opts NOT to do very much original enterprise reporting on local government or politics, opting instead to wait for the MSM to actually report their Conventional Wisdom take on the news, at which point the free newspaper's so-called reporters will run ten sentences of rants based on whatever the MSM headline is.

Those of you who are more Sherlock Holmes and Patrick Jane than Inspector Clouseau in your sleuthing will no doubt be pleased to discover that your intuition and instincts are still well-developed and accurate.

You've still got IT!

The correct answer is that the headlines above all came from today's Opinions page of The Washington Post.  http://view.ed4.net/v/PSLW3N/FXIPE2/YHHH8W4/0Z22UB/MAILACTION=1&FORMAT=H?wpisrc=nl_opinions

My screenshot of today's Washington Post Opinions page email, which I receive everyday.

Yes, that bastion of journalism diversity, where you too can find gainful employment as a reporter, editor or columnist, regardless of your sex, race, sexual persuasion or whichever Ivy League school you graduated from, as long as you are a team player and know how to sing in a choir without being asked.

You will NOT ad lib or deviate from the gospel according to The Washington Post.

The guilty parties above are, respectively:

Dana Milbank, Mitt’s convention speech, In his own words. Well, almost.

Kathleen Parker, Santorum’s failed pander, A false and snobbish attack on the president.

Harold Meyerson, Out-of-touch Republicans, Romney and Santorum’s struggles bode ill for GOP.

Ruth Marcus, Santorum’s war against elites, Campaigning with a chip on his shoulder.

Katrina vanden Heuvel, Pushing Michigan away, Why the GOP won’t win the state in November.


If there's anything above that deserves special attention due to its ironic nature, it's Kathleen Parker calling out Rick Santorum for calling President Obama being a snob.
Ironic because the worst kind of insufferable snob is one that won't admit it, and that's what Kathleen Parker is.


Well, that is besides being a journalist with a rather convenient memory, which is almost mandatory to be a card-carrying member of the MSM.
Which is to say that when reality bursts her version of the world, she finds it easy to either compartmentalize what challenges that view, or forget it entirely.
But aren't the facts supposed to matter?


Tell me, in this April 2008 video, who is Hillary Clinton accusing of being an elitist snob?



Hillary Clinton responds to Barack Obama's remarks to Democratic Party supporters at San Francisco fundraiser that "Small towns cling to guns or religion"
http://youtu.be/xNoJ0q6HrK8

"Pennsylvanians don't need a president who looks down on them. They need a president who stands up for them, who fights for them, who works hard for your futures, your jobs, your families." 

-Hillary Clinton

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/us/politics/13campaign.html

Oh, now you remember!

A close examination of Parker's own past columns over the years show what a genuine hypocrite and snob she is, when, at various times, in order to make herself more marketable, she's tried to create new identities for herself.


For a while, Parker tried to cultivate a public image of herself as the 'thoughtful Moderate,' who called-out the excesses of both liberals and conservatives, or, if she thought that it would play better, cast herself as the  modern-day educated "Southern" woman columnist, someone who was game to play at being semi-folksy in calculated ways once in a while to differentiate herself from the gray blather around her, esp. when she was  in Orlando.
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/kathleen/parker091008.php3?printer_friendly


Sure, because Orlando was the South!
Maybe to someone who never leaves Manhattan. 


Locally, there's really no telling why the Miami Herald foolishly has persisted in running Parker's all-so-predictable columns, or even worse, running those of awful Mary Sanchez of the Kansas City Star, whose dreary and unoriginal columns sound exactly like the Herald's own Editorial Board's predictable and myopic view of the world, esp. on illegal immigration, rather than make any serious effort to develop their own clever and original South Florida-based conservative or moderate columnist, whose fresh, idea-filled columns would run in the OpEd section, not in the State & Local section, which as most sharp-eyed observers would agree, is THE most predictable section of a newspaper its size in America.
Stale and reeking of moth balls.


If you agree, and I know that many of you do, given the feedback I get about the state of the Herald in emails and at various public policy or govt. events throughout South Florida, where I run into and speak to friends and colleagues and people who at least claim to read the blog, maybe you should share your concerns about that (and the Miami Herald's general state of listlessness) with Herald publisher David Landsberg about his singular lack of vision and ambition for the paper in the 21st Century.


In case you forgot, I already have -a few times.
And publicly posted it here on the blog for all to see.


In any case, for whatever illogical reason they have, the Herald keeps running Parker and yet when push comes to shove, how does her column really differ fundamentally in its message from reflexively liberal Dana Milbank's or Eugene Robinson's?


That's just it, it doesn't.
It's the chorus effect.
Lots and lots of the very same perspective are NOT equivalent to a diversity of opinions. 

Just common sense - Peter King's long-overdue hearings on Muslim radicalism in U.S. gets backing from an unexpected ally at The WaPo: Ruth Marcus

Above, 9/11 pilot Mohammed Atta's Florida Driver's License

While living in Arlington County, I followed the 9/11 Commission hearings VERY closely, more than just about anyone I knew, watching or taping many of them off of C-SPAN, and, consequently, often staying-up late at night to catch up on their activities. Though it seems obvious now, while I'd heard from many sources that some of the hijackers had used Broward County Library computers to access the Internet to send messages -and book their flights- it never dawned on me to think about where, specifically, they had lived in South Florida.

But despite how much of the hearings I watched, I couldn't see everything, so it wasn't until another Washington-area friend who worked on Capitol Hill -also originally from Florida- pointed it out to me one night at a sports bar, that I found out that 9/11 pilot Mohammed Atta lived in Hollywood.
In fact, 4.6 miles from my father's home in Hallandale Beach.

(Not the subject of the column below, true, but just wanted to mention it all the same. Also relevant: On the morning of 9/11, I was working directly across Pennsylvania Avenue from the Dept. of Justice, the FBI and The National Archives. I was working on a litigation project for the law firm Crowell & Moring, a project involving DOD that was supposed to send me and my team to Dayton for a few weeks that Fall, but that was cancelled for obvious reasons.
From the firm's large windows facing Pennsylvania Avenue -and even more so from the large balcony that overlooked the street that were clearly perfect viewing for Inauguration Day festivities- I and the dozens of us on my flooor could clearly see the dark smoke arising in the SW from The Pentagon, just past our view looking towards the Old Post Office.
More about my 9/11 experiences in Washington, D.C. here, from a Sept. 2011 post, 
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/911-george-f-will-on-american-landscape.html)

Well, I've been sitting on them for a while now.
Wondering, wondering, wondering just when to run them in this space, but this excellent common sense perspective by liberal columnist Ruth Marcus in today's Washington Post about voluble Rep. Peter King of Long Island, and his resolve to finally have some long overdue congressional hearings on radical Islam in the U.S., despite protests from the usual suspects and however an imperfect a vehicle for that overdue development she thinks he might be, just might be the sign I've been waiting for.

So what's the them?
My sign to let you know that coming soon to the blog will be some delicious articles, columns and video about Islamic radicalism and not-so-democratic Muslim immigrants (not at all interested in assimilation) that I guarantee you you haven't seen or heard about elsewhere in the American Mainstream Media.

At least, as represented by the Miami Heralds and NPRs of the world, where news stories and real-life actualities that don't fit their political or social template never see the light of day in print or make the airwaves.

That's largely because even some liberals can see the lie of the fiction long articulated by the MSM, in the U.S. as well as in Europe, that EVERY Muslim -esp. immigrants- are just like Jane & John Q. Public, whether they live in Northern Virginia, Queens, London, Paris or Malmö.
Nope.

Some are but more than you think are NOT.
Just because the press wants it to be so doesn't change reality -or human behavior.

I know something of this first-hand because my first roommate at IU was a great guy named Salim who just also happened to be a Kenyan-born Muslim from Oman, who was at school on a World Health Organization (WHO) scholarship.

Salim was very appreciative of the opportunity he had to live and study in the United States and loved IU and the beauty and friendliness of Bloomington more than many of my other friends, who were blase about it, and because of his personality and willingness to talk about what he knew about growing-up in a life different than ours, Salim made friends easily.

A later roommate in the Washington area was a completely different story. I had known many Iranian-born friends as a kid growing-up in North Miami Beach, even seeing Grease at a drive-in with two -count 'em two- ridiculously cute and vibrant Iranian sisters in our family's convertible when I was in high school.

Their brother was a soccer teammate of mine and as I've related here previously, I sometimes went with him and his family to anti-Shah rallies at the JFK Torch of Freedom on Biscayne Blvd. in downtown Miami because members of his own family had been tortured or killed by the Savak. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,912364,00.html

The Iranian-born medical student I was somewhat forced to live with in Arlington once another roommate moved-out just weeks before the lease was up -a know-it-all with with a real superiority complex- told me plenty of amazing stories about ways that Iranian students he knew played the State Dept. reps in Europe at the embassy or consulates for fools, in order to get visas.
They accomplished this by telling them the appropriate narrative that would allow them to be admitted into the country.

He said there even was a list of which State Dept. consular offices were more easy to fool than others, and since it was important to get to the U.S., they didn't mind the additional costs of flying out of whatever European country they might be living in in order to get to a consular office with a reputation for letting people in. Fly from Germany to Copenhagen or Portugal or... He knew that for a fact because it worked for HIM.

If college students knew how to game the system, do you honestly think that well-trained people with nefarious intentions and unlimited resources can't do even more?

Some people can never let go of their internal anger, never really want to fit in and are keenly disposed to wreck havoc on civil society wherever they can, even if that means corrupting freedoms or denying other people's guaranteed rights.

And when they're caught on film, they... yes, often celebrate their anti-social behavior.
That is, until they realize that it will make them look bad once it is shown on TV or the Internet. That moment of clarity is always a sight to see!

As you will soon see here for yourself, there's almost nothing better on TV then when the often-dubious world of Reality TV slams head-first into the behavior of the 'Real World' that the Left and its apologists in the media has been making excuses for for years.

That it happened in Sweden is not so surprising, sorry to say, but I can't help but think that if it had happened on a British TV show, where the conversation would've been in engelska, we'd all have long since seen the video by now and that it would be sure-fire water cooler conversation once 20/20 or Nightline or Sixty Minutes highlighted the behavior for Americans.

That is, if people still really have water cooler conversation as shown on The Office, instead of sipping their dopey Five-Hour drinks and $4 fruity organic drinks from their desk when there's a perfectly good cold Dr. Pepper in the soda machine looking to add drinking satisfaction.

-----

The Washington Post
Islamic radicalism: The questions that Rep. Peter King is right to ask
By Ruth Marcus
Wednesday, March 9, 2011

One of the odder exchanges I've ever seen during a congressional hearing involved Attorney General Eric Holder, Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith and the phrase "radical Islam."

Smith, at a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee last May, cited three recent terrorist incidents: the Fort Hood shooting rampage, the underwear bomber and the Times Square bomber. "Do you feel that these individuals might have been incited to take the actions that they did because of radical Islam?" he asked Holder.

The attorney general did his best not to go there.
"There are a variety of reasons why I think people have taken these actions," he said.
"I think you have to look at each individual case."

Smith tried again - and again.
Holder repeatedly resisted, before grudgingly acknowledging the obvious. "I certainly think that it's possible that people who espouse a radical version of Islam have had an ability to have an impact on people like" the accused Times Square bomber, he said.

Read the rest of the excellent column at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/08/AR2011030804487.html

----

Dr. Pepper TV commercial, 1960's
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpByXzdMQfk

When I first got to Bloomington in August of 1979 and told people I met at my dorm, Briscoe Quad, or people I met on and off the IU campus that I was from North Miami Beach, it was very quickly obvious that they imagined that my life down here in high school on weekends was probably not unlike the end of this commercial, albeit many years later, with grill parties at the beach, throwing frisbees and footballs around and cute girls prancing around everywhere...

Believe me, it was very disappointing to have to tell them the truth about how boring and mundane late 1970's life in NMB was, or how many great opportunities or locales were wasted.

Haulover Beach on the Intercoastal side could get crazy on weekends, but it was never fun like life depicted in films or TV about teen life in SoCal, whom I envied.
You know, where people describe every other thing they go to as "epic"?
If only we had had cell phones and digital cameras and the Internet then...