Cowboy Confessional

Posted By Guy Smith on January 31, 2012

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Worsening economic news can only mean a worsening level of propaganda.

This is where MSNBC enters the picture.

The Congressional budget Office (CBO) today announced that the U.S. economy will go from tragic to worse, echoing sentiments of a double-dip depression. Barring miracles that would make the Second Coming look second rate, America’s jobless rate will rise to 8.9% before this year is over, and slide upward to 9.2% in unlucky ‘13. Were these glum tiding were not bad enough, the last four years of $1 trillion deficits are just the beginning.

Tim Robbins is likely wondering where his “smart president” wandered off to.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman and perpetual partisan Kent Conrad immediately located a microphone to toss out The Lie of Balance (avoiding exposure of the opposite assumption in order to avoid providing balanced perspective) and The Lie of Unexamined Alternatives (examining only half of an obviously two-sided discussion to keep people from obtaining a full perspective). In apparent jest Conrad conned “Republicans must be willing to put revenue on the table.”

Propaganda relies in large part in obfuscating alternatives. If your scheme stands alone, then busy voters have no option other than to hope you are right, then turn their attention back to kids soccer games, grocery shopping, jobs … that time consuming stuff called life. Conrad hijacked airtime to put only one half of a possible solution before dinner time news watchers, ignoring the non-GOP elephant in the room, namely a Federal spending spree rivaled only by my ex-wife’s credit card habit. Indeed, Democrat reluctance to discuss Uncle Sam’s spending problem is a case of The Lie of Limited Perspective (avoidance of exposing the big picture or long-range trends) and The Lie of Historical Obfuscation (obscuring or marginalizing historical trends in order to lure people toward the same end).

Not that anyone at MSNCB would expose it.

Let’s be blunt. Most networks have news desks with propagandist tendencies. MSNBC is a propaganda desk with news tendencies. In today’s example, MSNBC culled from, and misreported, an element of the CBO study that indirectly blames George Bush for the CBO’s forward projections. In a short laundry list of congressional (in)actions that keep future deficits higher than a Haight Ashbury inhabitant, one was retaining Bush-era tax cuts. MSNBC elevates this tidbit to the top of their story and misrepresents by stating that the CBO report “… says that annual deficits will remain in the $1 trillion range for the next several years if Bush-era tax cuts slated to expire in December are extended.” In this they ignored that the CBO also listed Alternative Minimum tax changes, continual Medicare overpayments to doctors, and Congress’s utter failure to let super committee automatic cuts to kick-in.

MSNBC enjoys using The Lie of Slices (using a small slice of data to simultaneously obscure the reality presented by all the available data, and creating a false sense of blame). Later on the claim that the federal deficit “would largely be solved” by rescinding tax cuts, but never shows the separate effects of all the CBO’s observations, and studiously ignores dire CBO predictions about continued increases in spending as the decade grinds on.

Political propaganda never ends, and oozes up the drain pipe during election years. With an incumbent president exacerbating a horrid economy, his party and propaganda wing will be in full damage control. Those standing in unemployment lines with not be swayed.

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Posted By Guy Smith on January 26, 2012

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It is unsafe to live in San Francisco, especially at the sheriff’s house.

In this city known for institutionalized corruption, citizens rarely blink over common City Hall scandals. But when the newly elected pro-gun-control sheriff has his personal firearms confiscated while being saddled with an emergency protective order separating him from his wife and kid, even San Francisco’s more medicated residents take notice.

Ross Mirkarimi – a former Green Party leader turned Democrat, police academy graduate and former District Attorney’s Office investigator – was elected late last year to be San Francisco’s new top gun. He celebrated his win and New Year’s Eve by (allegedly) roughing-up his wife. After a kindly neighbor reported the incident, and tossed authorities a video tape of fresh bruises, investigators learned that Mirkarimi’s (alleged) domestic violence was executed in from of his prepubescent son, and it may not have been the first time Mirkarimi manhandled his mate.

“A strong message needs to be sent. You cannot commit crime with impunity like this,” was Mirkarimi’s statement … five years prior in response the The City’s inability to control street violence (as opposed to home violence … perhaps Mirkarimi merely maintains the enduring San Francisco sentiment that what happens in the privacy of one’s home is a civil right). But his impunity message is not lost on fellow public employees “No one is above the law,” District Attorney George Gascón said. “Whether this was the elected sheriff or any other San Francisco resident, this type of behavior is inexcusable, criminal and will be prosecuted.”

If convicted, Mirkarimi could serve up to a year in the county hoosegow.

Of all the ironies in this unfolding flap, tops is that Mirkarimi has long been an ardent proponent of gun control, a legislative sludge that most of the country has rejected. As recently as last year, while pimping putrid data to defend San Francisco’s draconian and unconstitutional gun control laws, Mirkarimi perjured before the San Francisco Public Safety Committee to add various “findings” as a litigation prophylactic.  “There is ample evidence that [these] laws are needed now, more than ever, and that they will save countless lives every year,” was his inaccurate claim. Mirkarimi deployed The Lie of Statistics (the use of numbers that present misleading information and distort perspective) as a primary propaganda tool, though it seems he thinks guns are safe enough to have in his home while (allegedly) battering his bride.  He claimed he was seeking to “Fortify our defense of reasonable gun-safety laws,” which was an inelegant instance of The Lie of Legislative Salvation (assuring people that law by itself will cure a social ill).

Mirkarimi is a one man misinformation machine.

His potential year in jail may not be, and may not be unprofitable.  Mirkarimi intends to resist.  “I believe that these charges are very unfounded. And we will fight these charges,” he said in what might an instances of The Lie of Lewinsky (forcefully making flat denials of observable fact to cast doubt in otherwise lucid minds).  But if convicted, Mirkarimi has greased his re-employment path by pushing legislation to give hire-a-felon tax breaks to local businesses. As a campaign opponent prophetically noted about Mirkarimi’s proposal “An ex-offender leaving prison for domestic abuse now has a job preference that a domestic violence victim does not have.”

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Posted By Guy Smith on January 20, 2012

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Newt Gingrich, during last nights GOP debate, expressed surprise that “CNN would take trash like that and use it to open a presidential debate.” In other words, the Carrollton Chameleon is shocked that the mainstream media hinges their ratings on salacious salvos and tawdry tripe.

Newt is the only person who is surprised. Everyone else expects it.

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Posted By Guy Smith on January 16, 2012

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If physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.
Martin Luther King Jr.

And it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion.
Barack Obama

One man used love to bridge a nation, and another man used elitism to divide it.

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Posted By Guy Smith on January 12, 2012

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Andrew Rosenthal has dragged the New York Times’ reputation to a new low.

I didn’t think it was possible.

Andy pens an inappropriately titled column called The Loyal Opposition. Anyone familiar with the now irrelevant Forth Estate sees the irony of naming a newspaper column The Loyal Opposition, and the side-splitting frivolity for it being under the NYT banner. Most media produces propaganda and the Times has positively made an art of misinformation masking as news. That they pay Andy to mint propaganda is not surprising, though the notion that the Times is loyal or opposes authority makes Three Stooges scripts seem serious by comparison.

Andy wasted a fair amount of ink attempting to brand all Republicans as racists in an awkwardly written article titled Nobody Likes to Talk About It. Andy’s agitprop is instantly unmasked when he says there is a “racist undertone” in the Republican presidential debates. The word “undertone” sets the stage for eight effluvium filled paragraphs where Andy clumsily attempts to make simple statements appear to be racist. For example, Andy’s alleged mind perceives telling Barack Obama “you lie” is a racist statement.

Andy, you lie. And before you claim I am anti-Semitic, allow me to show you my collection of kippah from various friend-and-family events.

Andy’s goal is to amplify the false notion that Republicans, as a group, are racist. This seemingly immortal meme, one that is rapidly losing effectiveness, is an election year gambit to negatively brand the Republican Party, and by such diminish the chances of Republicans winning the senate or White House. Since all decent people (which includes most Republicans, most Democrats, but which certainly excludes Andrew Rosenthal) abhor racism, Andy attempts to leverage The Lie of Association (using invalid associations to demonize a person or position) to create innate loathing of Andy’s personal enemies.

That would be the Republicans, common sense, human decency and rational thinking.

Andy’s list of alleged racist remarks quickly falls past funny and into the realm of senile dementia. He claims that a comment about the size of Michelle Obama’s butt is racist (would the same comment about a Swedish woman with a typical Swedish caboose be racist as well).  Another comment, by a candidate’s family member, heckled Obama for having yet to release his college transcripts, a statement which Andy also alleged to be racist (the connection between non-disclosure of grades and race was not actually explained).  Andy then accuses a candidate that spoke about “poor children” in “housing projects” and assumed that even acknowledging their existence was racist (Andy has never been to white slums available in every major metro area).

Most amazingly Andy asserts that accusing the current (and temporary) president of creating an “entitlement society” was racist, supposedly for the historical fact that some races were more frequent recipients of government welfare. Yet Andy ignores all other forms of entitlement ranging from farm subsidies to subsidized property insurance to child tax deductions, and the union bail-outs that Obama masked as ‘stimulus.’ Somebody better tell Bob King that Republicans hate his race and want to let GM go bankrupt in order to cancel his union contracts.

All in all, Andy made odd allegations and offered no proof. He inexpertly used The Lie of Non Sequiturs (combining vaguely related, or completely unrelated, information to create a false impression or conclusion) to assemble out of newsprint a non-entity, which come to think of it is The Lie of Straw (using seemingly evil entity as a non sequitur point of argument). Andy chases ghosts that aren’t there.

Perhaps he is running away from the Dixiecrat ghosts of his own self-loathing.

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