Don's Tuesday column--6 days late (sorry)

             THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   9/18/2012

Faux journalism’s “fact check” mask for O

Before writing about Dinesh D’Souza’s remarkable and record-breaking movie (seen 8/24), “2016: Obama’s America,” it’s worth putting the current fad among the “Fourth Estate” (the news media), the so-called “Fact Check,” into perspective. The thinly-veiled, partisan-advocacy masquerade of “facts” being “checked” in this election season is writ large and broad, but the relevance to “2016” is how selective the checkers have been over the years.

For instance, practically every one of film-maker Michael Moore’s propaganda-laden documentaries, from his anti-gun screed “Bowling for Columbine,” to his (President George W.) Bush-deranged “Fahrenheit 9/11,” to his polemic against American health care, “Sicko,” have been greeted with wide coverage, friendly reviews and favorable analysis. Factual examination and deconstruction was left to conservatives at blogs, think tanks and other outlets; nary a discouraging word was heard on the largely liberal, sympathetic networks and cable shows. “Sympathetic” (to liberal causes) accurately describes America’s current iteration of mainstream media, or MSM for short. Voting preferences, party identification, contribution patterns and polled positions on issues by journalists, compared to other Americans, reveal their liberal leanings.

Indeed, when Salem Radio Network’s Tom Tradup inquired of AP’s Washington-bureau chief, Sally Busbee, regarding the selective “fact check” treatment of “2016,” her response was a limp “I don’t know specifically if we did ‘Fact Checks’ per se on the other (Moore’s) documentaries mentioned.” I guess doing a quick Google search of your own AP reporting is asking too much in the pursuit of ascertaining fairness.

In the case of “2016,” the Associated Press, now in another presidential election cycle of managing news to protect favored candidates, produced “Fact Check: Anti-Obama Film Muddy on Facts” to, shall we say, help soften the growing public interest in the movie. Their target readers certainly weren’t liberal (President) Obama-philes, or the ideologically conservative plurality of voters interested in how Obama’s life story would explain his rather radical decisions and policies.

Their goal is two-fold: 1) to introduce doubt in the minds of the vast independent middle about the movie’s narrative, meticulously documented in D’Souza’s 2010 book, “The Roots of Obama’s Rage,” and 2) to provide talking/arguing points to media interviewers. Such “journalists” are already inclined toward hostility at D’Souza’s story of Obama’s anti-western, anti-colonial agenda to diminish America’s place in the world.

Conservative analysts, such as myself, can find several explanations for Obama’s leftist policies and his use of nearly imperial, you might say “unitary executive,” power, skirting around Constitutional, legal, Congressional and other precedents to implement his liberal agenda. I would not rely solely on his immersion in the great anti-colonial waves that swept developing nations in the mid-1900s from Indonesia to Kenya. However, there is no denying the ideological continuum of resentment towards British, Portuguese, French and other colonial powers that enriched themselves on third-world resources, to include the current anti-American-wealth theme.

You know the oft-uttered criticism that we are only 5-or-so percent of the world’s population, but we use 25 (or pick your own shockingly high number) percent of the world’s resources. Some of our usual liberal advocates have so regaled us on this page; no less than President Barack Hussein Obama has made such jingoistic pronouncements in his speeches.

And why do they keep bringing it up when America has never colonized and abused other countries as those European powers have? Yes (drum roll, please), because of global warming/climate change alarmism over the so-called “greenhouse gas” that America produces in the course of providing power, products, homes and lifestyles to our citizens. The highest advocates for the various “cap and trade/tax” schemes have openly admitted to the end objective, intended or not, of redistributing American wealth to poorer nations.

How does that affect us here in Tehama County, you ask? As subjects of the State of California, we will (as in “you vill!”) be subject to carbon-rationing to satisfy AB 32’s mandates; it will make everything, and I mean everything, more, not less, expensive. It’s only fair, you see, since even in our economically depressed region we are living, the reasoning goes, an exalted, abundant lifestyle compared to poorer nations, such as Kenya and other sub-Saharan impoverished backwaters. You might rightly say that they produce their own poverty by virtue of having chosen, in the case of Kenya for instance, to reject the one legacy of British colonial rule that might have allowed them to develop an abundant economy as India has done: A freely chosen, private enterprise, individual ownership system supported by a Western-style representative democracy that protects the rights and property of individuals and minorities.

Two different dreams: that latter, Western-style economy of relative abundance, which America typifies so far, or the failed, third-world attempts by those such as Obama’s father who, together with the predominant political ideology of Kenya’s elite, advocated and produced yet another centrally-planned, socialist-inspired economic failure. Is Obama determined to “spread our wealth around” as he famously told Joe the Plumber? Enter “2016themovie.com” directly in your browser window, not in a Google, or other, search engine; they are giving every diversion they can from the actual movie home page. They don’t have a partisan agenda, do they? Currently (9/09) showing in Redding, Anderson and Chico.