‘Clueless’ Clark Alert: The Top Ten Undernews Stories of the Year, Part II

by Michael Walsh

5. Hide the Decline: “Climategate” and the CO2 ruling

Why it’s important: The unauthorized release in November of 61 megabytes of confidential files and emails hacked from the computers at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit – Ground Zero of the “anthropogenic global warming” racket – shocked nearly all sentient people into the realization that scientists could be just a corruptible as your average politician or, worse, your average “environmental journalists” as they sought to “hide the decline.” While each country’s capo di tutti capi was gathering in Copenhagen to hatch yet another scheme to beggar the industrialized West in the name of collective guilt, the scandal burbled along under the radar as rational people finally had the proof they needed that the Chicken Little alarmists were, well – crowing capons.  For years, skeptics had been derided by such barking lunatics as Albert Arnold Gore, Jr., as “deniers” – the word was deliberately loaded to evoke the Holocaust – even as the Man Who Flunked Out of Divinity School did his best to dodge all challenges to his newfound religion:


Meanwhile, with AGW going up in smoke like a fruitless sacrifice to a god that failed, and the Waxman-Markey “cap and trade” extortion bill faltering in Congress, along came the EPA, right on schedule, with its “endangerment finding” that carbon dioxide – you know, the stuff you breathe out when you exhale, and the same stuff that makes the good green plants happy, healthy and wise – is, of all things, a “pollutant.”  Still, the news for the Karbon Krazies just keeps on getting worse.

Why the MSM ignored the story: Are you kidding?  Corporations such as General Electric – the closest thing we have in America to the Krupp Steel Company – have bet the farm on “green technology,” and have mobilized their propaganda arm, better known as NBC/MSNBC, to go along with the charade.  Even the “Special” Commentator, Keith  Olbermann himself, is not dumb enough to bite the hand that feeds him.  And as for the New York Times, its climate apologist/blogger, Andrew C. Revkin, went for the progressive trifecta with a recent post that brought together “climate change,” money and, of course, George Soros.

4. Death Panels

Why it’s important: Because Sarah Palin, the woman who rules the world from her secret redoubt somewhere in the bowels of Facebook, said it.  What else do you need to know?  In one pithy phrase, the Woman Who Drives the Left Nuts drove them nuts yet again by summing up all that is wrong and monstrous about Obamacare.

My original comments concerned statements made by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a health policy advisor to President Obama and the brother of the President’s chief of staff. Dr. Emanuel has written that some medical services should not be guaranteed to those “who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens….An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.”  Dr. Emanuel has also advocated basing medical decisions on a system which “produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated.

President Obama can try to gloss over the effects of government authorized end-of-life consultations, but the views of one of his top health care advisors are clear enough. It’s all just more evidence that the Democratic legislative proposals will lead to health care rationing, and more evidence that the top-down plans of government bureaucrats will never result in real health care reform.

Why the MSM ignored/made fun of the story: Are you kidding?  It’s an article of faith among the left that Sarah Palin is the stupidest woman in the world, too dumb to know how dumb she really is.  She’s the avatar of all their worst fears: a woman who declined to exercise her right to choose, who loves God, hunts and fishes and, in her spare time, exerts a political influence all out of proportion to her actual elected office – which, come to think of it, at the moment is none.  The Gaia-fearing progressive’s worst nightmare is of Sarah climbing in through his window one moonless night, there either to convert him to Christianity, take him on the Iditarod, or gut him and serve him up for supper.  So fearful is the Tolerant Left of Sarah that they set her church on fire with people inside it — after which, of course, she was the one who apologized, “if the incident is in any way connected to the undeserved negative attention the church has received since she became a vice presidential candidate.”

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3. The “Army Psychiatrist” and other Muslim plots against America.

Why it’s important:  Because, eight years after 9/11, the ongoing jihad against our country continues, whether we want to recognize it or not.  And yet, whenever there is an incident, the authorities, led by the FBI, immediately assure us that “there’s no evidence” it has anything to do with terrorism, and then slowly have to back away from their politically correct stupidity.  Recall the “Beltway sniper,” John Allen Muhammad, who recently met his Maker at the hands of the people of Virginia for murdering ten people in the Washington, D.C., area in 2002.  Or Najibullah Zazi, the “Denver man” who turned out to be an al-Qaeda-trained Afghan terrorist who wanted to blow up the New York City subways.  And then, in a class by himself, is Nidal Malik Hasan, the “Soldier of Allah” who (allegedly) shot and killed 13 real American soldiers last month at the Fort Hood army base in Texas.  And what was the MSM’s first reaction?  Why to describe him as an “Army psychiatrist,” of course!  Here’s the Christian Science Monitor’s take: note the scrupulous omission of the “M-word”:

As the military begins its eighth year of the war on terror, much of the focus has been on the inability to fully support the growing number of troops diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder or traumatic brain injury. But the events at Fort Hood cast the issue even wider. According to reports, Mr. Hasan desperately wanted to avoid being deployed to a war zone. While there appeared to be several reasons for this, including a conviction that he was a victim of harassment, he was also troubled by the stories he heard from overseas.

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Why the MSM ignored the story: Are you kidding?  For the clueless media, it’s all about the narrative, and the narrative has no room for card-carrying (in Hasan’s case, literally) Muslim terrorists deliberately infiltrating the officer corps, being trained in the use of weapons, and then unleashed on unarmed and unsuspecting grunts who were getting ready to ship out.  That sounds too much like the old Soviet “illegals” program, in which likely moles were found, cared for, supported and guided as far up the governmental food chain as Moscow Center could get them.  And Allah forbid that anyone in the “Christian” Science Monitor say something derogatory about Arab culture.

No, the official “narrative” is about an America at the breaking point, an Army stretched too thin, and the horrors of war – even when, like Hasan, you experienced them second-hand.  In the annals of pseudo-intellectual academic codswallop, “Secondary Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” has to rank right up there with phrenology and the eugenics movement endorsed by the sainted Planned Parenthood screwball Margaret Sanger, who, among other things, recommended forced sterilization.  As Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., famously said: three generations of imbeciles are enough!

But there’s a larger reason the MSM punted on this one, aside from the usual sob-sister features analyzing the slayer’s “motives.”  It’s an ugly truth, but here goes: they want us to lose.  As long as nothing, you know, too violent happens, especially to them.  For a generation of reporters and columnists raised on moral equivalence, nurtured on cultural relativism and wedded to the notion that our enemies are really friends who just haven’t tried to kill us yet, every foiled terrorist plot is “a bunch of clowns” and every Hasan is an “Army psychiatrist.”  After all, we deserve it.  With friends like the media, who needs enemies?


Meanwhile, let’s bring the jihadis here to America!  Yeah – that’ll work.

2. ACORN

Why it’s important: Let’s let Hannah Giles, who played the “prostitute” in the now-famous videos, explain:

Back in early September ACORN, one of the most established community organizing groups in the United States, found itself involved in an undercover video scandal involving a pimp, a prostitute, tax fraud, the smuggling of underage girls from El Salvador and a brothel used to fund a congressional campaign. Within days of releasing footage of ACORN employees assisting the pimp and prostitute with their business plans, the Census declared it was severing all ties with ACORN. The Senate voted 83-7 in favor of de-funding the controversial group. The House voted 345-75 to cut ACORN’s funding, and more than 20 states have demanded either a full investigation of ACORN or that they lose their funding. The IRS also ended up cutting their connections to the group.

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Why the MSM ignored it: Are you kidding?

Because 25-year old James O’Keefe and 20-year old Hannah Giles acted on a hunch, took a risk, sought the truth and shone a giant light on corruption. If it weren’t for media daredevil Andrew Breitbart their story would have never caused the shockwaves it did. The MSM is afraid of stories like Giles’s and O’Keefe’s because: 1) it makes them look useless; why aren’t the professionals breaking stories like this? How dare the tykes take the initiative? 2) The release method and style of the videos was intended to resonate with everyday Americans, not gain the approval of the media elites 3) The story had everything to do with a corrupt entity. And unfortunately, rather than exposing corruption the MSM has itself adopted a questionable and shady lifestyle.

1.  It’s the End of the Media as We Know It And We Feel Fine

It’s only fitting that the last word goes to Andrew Breitbart:

Why it’s important: The absolute admission by the reigning media class that they are not objective journalists and earnest gumshoe reporters is cause for celebration. The cabal that made sure George W. Bush became a toxic name to the body politic had even greater plans in 2008 when it offered up one-term senator and former Punahou School benchwarmer, Barack Obama, as the candidate of the millennium. Now that the deed is done, multiple scandals that would have felled mere-mortal presidents have gone completely unreported. Who needs Teflon when it’s not you who’s frying in the pan? Problem for the ostriches, however: the undermedia — the Internet, social networking, talk radio — has grown to become a formidable checks and balances for the traditional media. The current paradigm bodes ill for those rooting for ABC, NBC, CBS, The New York Times, Time Magazine, et al. As their readership and viewership plunges with every missed megastory, so do those eyeballs transfer to the more reliable and democratic new media now being fueled by citizen journalists testing their abilities in groundbreaking investigative journalism.

Why the MSM ignored it: Are you kidding?

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Posted Dec 18th 2009 at 1:38 pm in ACORN, Culture, Media Criticism, News, Obama, Politics | 66 Comments