Columnist.
For decades now, the liberal "news" media have demonstrated a dramatic tilt toward the gay agenda, beginning with their notion that there is no such thing as a "gay agenda." But now, as the Supreme Court has mandated gay "marriage" in all 50 states, the liberal world is celebrating the agenda it has been pushing for decades. Television coverage has been the usual appalling agitprop, but in this case it was also a victory lap. News segments have been either unanimous in their "analysis" or, if "balance" is presented, stacked by about 5-to-1. Simply put, a debate is not allowed, just as it is not allowed on global warming, gun rights, abortion and a host of other liberal imperatives. So much for free speech.
Hillary Clinton's campaign again signaled its contempt for the press during a July 4 parade in New Hampshire. Aides brought out ropes to cordon off the media. It was the perfect metaphor for a "news" media so cowered by their candidate that they would allow such a humiliating action. The images lit up Twitter on the holiday, but their reaction — or lack thereof — tells you all you need to know about their journalistic pride. The Clinton campaign treated this as a joke. Spokesman Nick Merrill issued a statement: "While the GOP may want to spin a good yarn on this, let's not get tied up in knots."
To look at virtually anything produced by Hollywood is to register confirmation that the libertine left cherishes clogging our popular culture with vulgarities. The messaging in movies, television and particularly music is punctuated deliberately and unnecessarily with all manner of language designed to offend. But when it comes to perfectly decent speech — spoken innocently with no bad intention — those same liberals need smelling salts. Welcome to the wacky world of "micro-aggressions," where conversation becomes a minefield of political correctness. It's all the rage on campuses. Both the University of California and the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point have circulated lists of "microaggressions" to faculty for allegedly instructional purposes. The list of unacceptable words and phrases just gets longer and longer. And funnier.
Back in 2003, the Associated Press gave serious aid and comfort to a vicious campaign against Sen. Rick Santorum over an interview he granted them dealing with the gay rights issue. AP spent a week promoting calls to remove Santorum from the Senate GOP leadership for this fraction of their interview: "If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery." AP hyped this comparison by adding the word "gay" between "consensual" and "sex." Santorum's point was philosophical: Where is a line drawn on sexual consent? Is there a line at all? And when you seek to erase any line, what does this do to society?
Marc Maron is a stand-up comedian and radio host in Los Angeles. Hipsters love his podcast, mostly interviews with other comedians, which he titled "WTF." On his website, the merchandise includes a coffee mug that says "Pow! I (soiled) my pants." You can understand why he was shocked President Obama wanted to grant him an interview. As for Obama's tastes, and his devotion to the decorum of his office, nothing shocks us. He has neither. Eleven years ago, Maron was an original crew member on the leftist radio network Air America, where he hosted a show he called "Morning Sedition." They were filled with certitude that they would overtake The Rush Limbaugh Show with their snobbish liberal comedy. It belly-flopped, then sank.
There is a healthy discussion now underway within Catholic circles asking the improbable question: What is the message of Laudato Si, the pope's new encyclical on the environment? The political left feels not just vindicated but triumphant. Global warming is not just sound science; it is dogma. Conservative skeptics are therefore not just ignorant; they are immorally ignorant. Last week, Rush Limbaugh argued that "what this papal encyclical is saying is that every Catholic should vote for the Democrat Party. ... That's what it is. How else do you interpret it when the pope comes out and sounds like Al Gore on global warming and climate change?"
Black activist Rachel Dolezal was pressed to resign as the leader of the Spokane, Washington, chapter of the NAACP when her parents exposed her secret. Her parents are both white. They produced winsome pictures of her with straight blonde hair, freckles and blue eyes. She is a fraud. When this story first broke on social media, conservatives were instantly amused. The irony of timing! If the liberals feel it is laudable for someone to be "brave" enough to pretend to be a gender not "assigned at birth," then why not play games with race as well? Most blacks don't find humor here. They were quickly offended that someone would be so dishonest to pretend to be their race. Some believe it was like putting on "blackface," mocking them.
CNN's Jake Tapper kicked off his new hosting gig on the Sunday news show "State of the Union" featuring an interview with Bill Clinton, arranged through his Clinton Global Initiative. It's a big name, but a tough start for a serious journalist. With the exception of his infamous snorting, knee-jabbing performance with Chris Wallace in 2006, the former president has negotiated a succession of journalistic foot-rubs surrounding his tightly scripted Global shindigs. On that sycophantic curve, Tapper did well. He never prompted Clinton into a squinting, pointing rage, but make no mistake: He asked some tough questions. Regarding the Clinton foundation, Tapper channeled "a lot of people," who suggest it's not realistic to say "these companies, these wealthy individuals, these governments, none of them sought anything? I mean, some of them did have business before the State Department."
Brittney Griner was a huge college star in women's basketball two years ago. Her dominance of the sport at 6-foot-8 was unquestioned — she could dunk with ease, and she blocked more shots than anyone else in college basketball history, men or women. Her Baylor squad was the first team in college basketball history, men's or women's, to win 40 games in a single year. Griner was drafted first overall in the WNBA. She also made headlines later in 2013 for coming out as a lesbian. Along with other athletes, like Jason Collins in the NBA, she was lauded by the press for being an "inspiration" to the gay community. Griner and Johnson announced their engagement last August and made an appearance on the TLC wedding-reality program "Say Yes to the Dress."
Politico keeps posting ridiculous columns by both Democrats and Republicans who charge that the Clinton scandals are either (1) nonexistent or (2) all politically harmless. Joe Conason, a leftist author who's been dismissing every Clinton scandal for decades in books with titles like "The Hunting of the President," is at it again. This time he's produced "The Fake Clinton Scandals Are Back: The right's newest crusade has an old fake villain." Conason should be easily dismissed by the editors for criminal ignorance — or downright deception. One can downplay things like Benghazi. One cannot deny they are scandals — or at the very least, serious controversies. It's better to focus on the second kind, a Republican who thinks the Clintons are much smarter than idiotic conservatives who hold their scandals against them.
The story of Bruce Jenner declaring against human reality that he's a woman was already a tired old story, exhausted last month in a one-hour prime-time ABC "news" special. But that's not how the grand pooh-bahs of our news and entertainment media see it. They can't get enough. Deconstruction is a tonic. And so the Kardashian-Jenner Inc. rollout continues, a perfect combination of shameless TV hucksterism and a leftist revolt against the old-fashioned notion of natural humanity. How yesterday. We know — everyone knows — Vanity Fair rolled out a new cover of Bruce Jenner gaudily underdressed as a woman with the headline "Call Me Caitlyn." Not a cover story, mind you, just a cover image. The media went bananas. ABC, CBS and NBC offered more than 48 minutes of coverage in two days, as if Jenner was now the Queen of America.
Journalists are supposed to be the most informed members of society. Nothing is supposed to get past the iron traps in their brains. So which one of these concepts sounds more like a brain cramp? 1. Why would Hillary Clinton avoid taking questions from the press now that she's running for president? She's fantastic at defending herself when the scandals mount. 2. President Obama has run an administration amazingly free of scandal. Not just the president, but also everyone he has chosen to serve has been a pillar of integrity. These are actual concepts forwarded on television in the last few days.
Ann Coulter has another best-selling book coming out, provocatively titled "Adios, America: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole." One major target of Coutler's barbs is our "objective" media. Lord knows Coulter understands they deserve the hectoring. News reports are slavishly sensitive to the Latino Left's political correctness. Start with the terminology. The factual term "illegal immigrants" is somehow an extremely mean-spirited description, even though it's 100 percent accurate. They claim to prefer less loaded lingo. Like "Dreamers." Coulter took exception to a New York Times story from last November reporting that a Mexican-themed restaurant in Fort Collins, Colorado called "Illegal Pete's" was hounded by leftists to change the name, even though it was named for the Anglo business owner's father.
The latest scorecard from the American Conservative Union is out, and the voters of Virginia might want to file a complaint about truth in advertising with the press corps. Senators Tim Kaine and Mark Warner have routinely been portrayed in news reports as "moderates" and "centrists." But after two years in the Senate, Tim Kaine has a perfect zero on the conservative scale. Mark Warner has a lifetime score of 10.33 percent conservative, but his last two annual scores have been a 4 and an 8. They could be mistaken for Barbara Mikulski. Far-left is middle of the road on the media spectrum. The Washington Post has been especially guilty of suggesting over the years that Kaine was as pious as conservative stalwart Ken Cuccinelli, a man they place on the "far right." In 2012, the Post profile of his GOP opponent George Allen suggested he was seen as a "colossally insensitive brute," but this is how the Post began a Kaine profile: "It's not unusual, on an election-year Sunday, to find a white candidate in a black church. But Tim Kaine, swaying this month to the gospel groove at St. Elizabeth Catholic Church in a poor Richmond neighborhood, wasn't on the campaign trail. He was taking a break from it at his home parish."
There's no classroom experience the libertine supports more mightily than "sex education." They have struggled to banish even a whisper of a religious worldview from the classroom. Only the secular and "science-based" ideology is allowed. The Daily Beast website recently celebrated a San Francisco ruling: "Hero Judge Rules Abstinence-Only Sex Ed Is Illegal." Judge Donald Black ruled "access to medically and socially appropriate sexual education is an important public right," and that one district had provided "medically inaccurate information," like the notion that sexual abstinence prevents pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease. Do the guardians of "science" — like the happy "reproductive justice" folks at the American Civil Liberties Union — think this is "medically inaccurate" because no child can avoid having sex before graduation?
It was outrageous for ABC News to promote Bill Clinton's spokesman George Stephanopoulos to the top of the political-anchorman heap. It was shameless to keep him there, even as Hillary Clinton keeps running for president. Conservatives never felt he was an appropriate choice, and never felt he sincerely attempted fairness and balance in his "journalism." This feeling should belong to every American now that it's out that Stephanopoulos donated $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation — run by Bill and Hillary — over the last three years. Given his background in the innermost circle of Team Clinton in the 1990s, these donations are either remarkably stupid or remarkably shameless. Stephanopoulos is not stupid. Given his inner-circle status, it's impossible to believe that he didn't know another Hillary presidential campaign was in the works, and that his donations over the last three years were going to underline every accusation that he is in the tank for the Clintons.
Sofia Vergara is the Spanish-accented sexpot on the ABC sitcom "Modern Family." She's also now the center of an unwanted controversy over a "modern family." She's fighting with an ex-fiance over two frozen embryos. Back in 2013, Vergara granted a TV interview to Dr. Oz to discuss her baby-making plans: "I've been very concerned about fertility and I wanted to take advantage of science, so I froze my huevos." She and her fiance Nick Loeb had no success with a surrogate mother on two embryos, and they made two more before the relationship soured. The current controversy began when Loeb recently wrote an op-ed for The New York Times publicly asking for his test-tube children, with no expectation of joint custody or child support payments: "When we create embryos for the purpose of life, should we not define them as life, rather than as property?"
The media elite have a preeminent place in our politics, allegedly with the knowledge to declare what is politically feasible and what is not, including which candidates have a chance at winning and which do not. Before we head into a presidential primary season, it's time to insist that these "experts" don't know any better than the rest of us. And sometimes their biases so heavily shade their predictions as to keep themselves in the dark about reality. Take the elections in Israel in March. The manufactured conventional wisdom and polling predicted a tight race and rough sledding for conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. When instead the conservative won easily, our media exploded in the usual sore-loser outbursts about how Mideast peace was dead. An Obama campaign stalwart (2012 field organizer Jeremy Bird) enriched himself but ended up on the losing side. This wasn't depicted as a bad sign for President Obama or his political team.
Hollywood and global-warming panic have always been a natural match. After all, who can tell you better to cut back on your wasteful ways better than a high-flying multimillionaire movie star with the carbon footprint of a Tyrannosaurus rex? It's never mattered that the stars have all the scientific expertise of Pee-wee Herman. They're just so good-looking and famous, who cares? PBS broadcast a 10-hour series in 1990 entitled "Race to Save the Planet." The show's host was Meryl Streep, who proclaimed: "By the year 2000 ... the Earth's climate will be warmer than it's been in over 100,000 years. If we don't do something, there will be enormous calamities in a very short time." Oops.
Liberals claim to be the world's boldest defenders of freedom of expression, which is, of course, nonsense. Here's another canard: Liberals also claim to be the most offended against anyone "blaming the victim." What liberals possess is an ideological system which identifies favored groups as victims and supports squelching the free speech of anyone challenging them. One of those favored groups is Muslims. Over the weekend, the American Freedom Defense Initiative held the Muhammad cartoon contest in Dallas, obviously a provocative event. But it wasn't meant to result in two Islamic extremists showing up with assault rifles, later shot to death by police after they opened fire. Two men identifying as ISIS have now attacked America — in our homeland. So how did the press respond? Liberal journalists deplored AFDI's exercise of free speech and blamed the targeted victims for the attack.
