Don's Tuesday Column

THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   1/20/2015

Liberal propaganda; Islamic extremist hypocrisy

Crime is at elevated levels (mostly due to drug, particularly meth, usage); Prop 47 was passed by a foolish and misled electorate (“Oh, it says ‘Safe schools and neighborhoods,’ must be good”); and “Jerry’s kids” get “realigned” from jail into our local communities. Chief Probation Officer Robert Muench is at tonight’s Tea Party Patriots meeting, 6 PM at the Westside Grange. He is a straight talker who doesn’t mince words and may shed some light on the above situations.

A couple of recent syndicated columns struck this writer as transparent propaganda injecting phony assertions into the public’s awareness. One was a shameless anti-Fox News hit piece that was, in all likelihood, assembled by leftist Media Matters, a George Soros-funded operation. I’ll not bore readers with minutiae but will emphasize that—compared to the routine slants, loose facts and pro-Obama-crat spin by the networks, CNN and MSNBC—the rare slip by a newsreader or pundit on Fox is insignificant.

The larger irony is that, except for the center-right orientation of Fox News (no more of a rightward slant than, say, PBS’s Newshour is to the left), mainstream news functions as little more than “water carriers” and stenographers for Emperor Obama and his mouthpieces. Investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson, formerly of CBS, has documented the machinations of that news outlet to minimize the impact of her revelations over such Obama scandals as Fast and Furious, and the terrorist attacks, murdered American personnel, lies and cover-up in Benghazi.

Her riveting book, “Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation and Harassment in Obama’s Washington,” should cause the Beltway MSM reporter class to hang its collective head in shame. That, however, would require as fierce and dogged a pursuit of Obama’s lying and Democrat corruption as was (often unjustifiably) directed at President Bush. Attkisson’s computer was hacked by government agents (so say outside computer experts), which ought to cause mass revulsion by the MSM. Hypocritically, they also had little outrage or indignation over prior hacks and intimidation involving James Risen and the AP.

Another article made a disgusting attempt to focus attention on supposed rightwing terrorism, preposterously comparing it to Islamic jihadist terrorism. Really! Nearly every single mass shooting for years has prompted knee-jerk assertions of inspiration by conservative/Tea Party ideology or Rush Limbaugh (i.e. Clinton after the Oklahoma City Murrah Federal Building bombing). Invariably, the news media quietly move on when either a) no such connection is found, or b) they connect to or frequent radical leftist/environmentalist/Occupy Internet sites or have written left-leaning manifestos or Facebook entries.

Ted Kaczynski (the anti-industrialist fanatic Unabomber) had a worn, dog-eared copy of Al Gore’s “Earth in the Balance.” A terminated cop in Southern California went on a murderous rampage; he had expressed anti-Bush and anti-2^nd Amendment rants in his past, I recall. Never mind that during 2013 the death toll from Islamic extremist violence reached 10,000. Until someone has watched beheadings by these evil purveyors of Islamist ideology, or heard the “Allahu Akbar” shouts accompanying the slaughter of civilians by the Islamic State fighters, they shouldn’t be uttering or writing disgusting twaddle about rightwing violence.

While on the subject, at DonPolson.blogspot.com, I’ve re-posted “This blog stands for freedom of expression—to he** with Islamic fanatics,” originally posted on 9/27/2012. It simply shows one of the original Danish anti-Muhammad cartoons (no, he’s not “The Prophet,” nor my or anyone else’s prophet other than practicing Muslims, AP’s “style notes” aside). It’s the “bomb in Muhammed’s turban” by Kurt Westergaard. More recent pictures and images on the subject are posted under the title, “Make the world safe for ridicule of Islam,” including some from the “Charlie Hebdo” publication—me: JE SUIS CHARLIE. Two biting and pointed ones include “If your religion is worth killing for, please start with yourself”; and a Christian and a Muslim girl comparing their respective holy books with the caption, “Hmmm. That’s weird. Mine says love thy neighbor & yours says to kill him if he doesn’t believe.”

Among many honest, insightful observations on Islam, French polymath (“a person of great and varied learning,” Webster) Ernest Renan’s 1883 Sorbonne lecture on Islam perceptively captures much: “Those liberals who defend Islam do not know Islam. Islam is the seamless union of the spiritual and the temporal, it is the reign of dogma, it is the heaviest chain mankind has ever borne. In the early Middle Ages, Islam tolerated philosophy, because it could not stop it…because it was as yet disorganized, and poorly armed for terror. But as soon as Islam had a mass of ardent believers at its disposal, it destroyed everything in its path. Religious terror and hypocrisy were the order of the day. Islam has been liberal when weak, and violent when strong. Let us not give it credit for what it was merely unable to suppress.”

The first Reuters/Ipsos poll of 2015 found that Emperor Obama’s approval rating remains low: 37% approve vs. 55% disapprove. “Worse [for Dems], with the GOP in charge of Congress, more say that the Republicans ‘have better plans on the economy, taxes and foreign policy than do Democrats,’ said the newly released poll… Overall, 56 percent said that the nation is on the ‘wrong track’” (Paul Bedard, Washington Examiner). Moreover, only 1 in 4 buy Team Obama’s claim that unemployment is improving—perhaps because uncorrupted numbers say it isn’t.