“If you don’t get it, you don’t get it,” The Washington Post once warned the politically nerdophobic. It turned out a Graham family un-coolness rating didn’t pack much punch in the peer pressure department. The paper that was once worth billions was sold to Jeff Bezos for 250 million.
Jeff renewed the copyright for the catchphrase the same month he bought the company. He finally figured out that the hipster act flew about as high for the Post as it would have for J. Edgar Hoover. That’s when the publisher made the switch. He went from “we’re cool” to solemn sanctimony overnight with the slogan: “Democracy dies in darkness.” Hank Williams belting out “I Saw the Light” is the perfect background tune while reading their sermons nowadays. “Blinded by the Light” comes in a distant second.
You don’t have to work at 1301 “K” St. NW not to get it though. The numbers are legion who fail to recognize that Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Ross Perot and Donald Trump all ran on the “new sheriff in Dodge” platform. Perot was the only one who never got elected. He did garner 19% of the popular vote trying – the highest returns of any third party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt in 1912.
Dissatisfaction with management hasn’t wavered that much since America’s bicentennial election. The major parties mostly rely on job security and customers spending apace to get their cretin into the Oval Office for two election cycles straight. That doesn’t mean anybody is fooled. They just know things could be worse.
Preachers of “reform” can never manage to resist the orgy with a 555 foot phallic symbol standing erect in their daily view. Some kind of myopia inducing toxin must seep from the walls of 1600 Penn. We’ve been hearing for years that people gunning for all the parasitic DC redundancy are the problem. The chief is demanding new studies, investigations and hidden files to quell the threat. Washington’s perennial secret weapon, parasitic redundancy, can never be redeployed frequently enough to satisfy the cling-ons.
The Capitol’s menagerie of goon squads, we are hearing, must remain on the trail of anyone worried about an overdose of government. Post management fades in and out of the same affliction. They scratch the surface of our maladies one day and turn on anyone who’d follow through fixing them the next. If we dare to risk DHS wrath, and give consideration to the idea that anything inside the beltway is amiss, where should we begin righting things?
Mass news media has drifted steadily for decades away from simply reporting details into policy advocacy. How often do we see anything remotely resembling a practical remedy?
Look at the controversy over law enforcement. I’ll freely admit to rarely getting the media’s take on “relevant” events. They give short shrift to all the most blatant cases of abusive illegal conduct while consistently failing to emphasize the carte blanche SCOTUS affords police through qualified immunity findings. The law that the high court claims needs “clearly establishing” is already well established in the criminal code. What is the obstacle to holding officers accountable? The lawyers expected to prosecute them for wrongdoing represent them against ordinary criminal defendants as their primary job. The likely conflict going after their partners in well over 90% of cases goes unnoticed.
Every state needs an independent body of lawyers policing police. This shouldn’t be an idea that takes a prophet coming down from Sinai to deliver. It is the simplest common sense. But it’s never anywhere in mainstream media wising us up with “solutions” on the net by the hour. It would have greatly reduced the chance that a crime as blatant as Philip Brailsford’s against Daniel Shaver would have left that cop on this side of a cage today.
A responsible, clued-in, media industry would be on the job of putting the Shaver video up against the one from Uvalde, Texas May, 24. Why is nobody in the big leagues of that racket on the looming question of what is taught at the FBI’s National Academy and other super-cop training programs? Do they amount to summer camps for cops?
While tossing around the idea of defunding police and seizing firearms at gunpoint in print, op-editors don’t get it. Qualified immunity, as presently constructed by the high court, cannot amicably co-exist with the bill-of-rights…unless we hold that our government is flawless – in which case the bill-of-rights is superfluous. This is the only explicable theory as the law enforcement community is charged with holding itself to account. These are observations too blatantly obvious to dwell on.
So, let’s get to inflation. We get daily reports of college customers skinned alive by exorbitant costs. Some people pay for edumacation into their dotage. The media claims a certain amount of discomfort with the present state of debt alums find themselves in. They also, on other pages on other days, take note of the incomprehensible expansion of administration in higher ed. Gee, could the developments be related? Why they aren’t put into the same columns whenever this matter is covered is equally incomprehensible. The troubles are one and the same. If you can’t see that you are not qualified to write on it.
It isn’t just the loan holders who pay. We get steady demands from state legislatures to up the ante before anyone can enter various fields of paying competition. A curriculum vitae has become a vital element in obtaining power over others. As diploma mills generate steady streams of the supposedly qualified, the consuming public joins in the finance of an educational Ponzi scheme. This is happening before we ever get to the fiscal consequences of loan forgiveness.
Daily papers, periodicals and broadcasters hire over such credentials without regard for lackluster performance. It isn’t just grads who end up paying – the costs are passed on by every employer who follows the orthodoxy that elite academies turn out the finest pool of talent. Careful scrutiny fails to bear this out with any consistency. That is, unless we believe what the public voluntarily chooses to consume takes second place to what someone dragging letters behind his name demands that they buy.
The people who’d inform us of a housing crisis can never seem to make the connection to a porous border. Resource shortages baffle writers from Ivory Towers who find unlimited consumption a basic human right. While limiting the supply of divergent opinion available to the mass market is the primary impediment they see to the coming utopia.
The Washington Post is willing to inform us that vulture capitalists, with hundreds of billions or more on hand like BlackRock, are bidding on single family homes and driving up prices. They then rent the places back to once potential homeowners who have been outbid – at now higher rents. What’s left out is that this predatory practice is exercised by the so-called “stakeholder capitalists.” This is a gang of billionaires claiming to now use their wealth looking out for you. Any common consumer who is wide awake would gladly prefer the reign of Gordon Gecko.
The World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, is the Vatican of the stakeholder capitalism faith. Their promotional material frequently features Larry Fink, BlackRock CEO, standing with Klaus Schwab, WEF Grand Pooh-Bah. This is the kind of detail the Post, and other sources concerned with low minority homeownership stats, never include. Jeff Bezos and every other tech and media mogul attends the Alpine conclave. And yet…”Democracy dies in darkness…”
The outcry about an underprivileged class in need of more and better medical attention never ceases. People die as facilities are overburdened. While it is now demanded that anyone who isn’t keen on the plumbing they were born with be accommodated – by a medical profession that can’t keep up with curable life-threatening conditions. The basic economics of supply in such arrangements is always a detail the advocates can’t be bothered with. Doctors carry the highest educational debt load of all.
It would be easy to go on at book length covering the media’s inability to associate societal symptoms with the underlying diseases. Meanwhile, they consider it a modest proposal to cut the mike of anyone who can. If we stand by and let the forces of government, media and academia decide who gets which versions of reality…we’re all going to get it…good and hard.
