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"Just the facts M'am, Just the facts." -- Sgt. Joe Friday

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This is the same media that has buried the fact that the man was shot in the face 10 weeks ago because it doesn’t suit their narrative.

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advocacy politics

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Advocacy – post electoral bureaucratic politics

Presenting facts in the light most favorable to your position, and most harmful to the position of your adversary, is expected of trial lawyers in the zealous pursuit of their clients’ case, or prosecution thereof. The jury decides which facts presented by the advocates to accept as persuasive, and the judge moderates the procedure to keep the process fair. Since the trial forum is balanced and moderated, advocates can go to any lengths in their representations of reality that they think they can get away with.

Political advocacy, also largely conducted by lawyers, has no jury for vetting facts and no judge to moderate a fair process. Political advocates are presumed to be tempered by the ethics of statesmanship.

It only takes a few minutes observation of the C-Span coverage of Congress to refute that myth and see how the throttle on advocacy of adherence to the ethics of statesmanship gets abused and ignored.

Locally in Elbert County, hard Left writers routinely build cases using all the devices a lawyer might employ in trial advocacy. And after one of them presents such an analysis, an applauding cadre of supporters dependably, relentlessly, repeat and elevate the case ad nauseam to drown out any questions of fact.

The longer they can keep the attention of the media, the thicker their patina of legitimacy becomes, and the more insistent the accolades get. The media rarely fail to cooperate.

Periodically the voters get a chance to reset the players after an extended clock numbered in years has expired, but the vote really only checks the most egregious offenders. Meanwhile, in the middle of the clock where untold thousands of bureaucratic actions play out, the ebbs and flows of advocacy politics do the most damage.

clever propaganda

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Consider this.

Mayor de Blasio in New York announced he is closing down several charter schools. These schools are performing better than nearby public schools. Thousands of supporters of the charter schools are rallying this morning to stop the closing of these schools. Fox News ran a segment with video of the thousands of upset, pleading parents, including snippets from some of the speakers.

Then Fox News cut to a panel of two experts for some analysis with the news anchor. Sometimes the experts in these panels sort out for and against the news subject, sometimes they’re both in favor or both against. In this case, they were both critical of de Blasio’s action, both in favor of the charter schools.

Here’s the rub – during the analysis segment when the screen showed head shots of the screen anchor and the two experts, the tag line on the screen underneath the panel read in part, “de Blasio rallies against charter schools.” For the rest of that news subject, the producers did not cut back to video from the rally.

Now, de Blasio wasn’t at the rally they’d just shown pictures from that contained thousands of people who were all in favor of charter schools. The propaganda effect from the tag line’s misrepresentation was to aggrandize de Blasio by falsely assigning the rally images just seen to him, and confuse the impact of the news analysis portion of the segment. Leftists would call this a win/win.

People who came late to the news report, who did not see the video from the rally or hear the sound clips from some of the rally speakers, saw a confused news presentation where the content the panel speakers delivered did not reconcile with the report of a de Blasio rally that never occurred.

Was this some news editor’s attempt to be clever that ended up taking down the impact of the entire segment? Or was this a deliberate misrepresentation intended to undermine the agreement and conclusions of the news panel that were in favor of charter schools and against de Blasio?

Understanding how the Left works, my money is on the latter explanation.

We’re surrounded by this sort of thing in the media. You cannot just absorb program content – audio, visual, or the interplay between the two – without putting it through a critical filter. And Fox News is, sadly, not exempt.

doublethink

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“In the extended republic of the United States, and among the great variety of interests, parties, and sects which it embraces, a coalition of a majority of the whole society could seldom take place on any other principles than those of justice and the general good[.]”

James Madison, Federalist No. 51

In the name of justice, the Left pursue social justice.  In the name of the general good, the Left pursue entitlements.

Much like Islamists hide behind English translations to mask their jihad, the Left hide behind un-mutated original concepts to deceive those who can refute their substituted deceptions.

The Left took what began as universal principles for all Americans, principles essential to the American order protected by our Constitution and responsible for America’s success, and turned them into narrow principles for the benefit of only those Americans in their voting block, and to the detriment of the rest of Americans with whom they disagree.

Madison was correct, but he did not anticipate the subversion of language that the Left now routinely practices.  He did not anticipate the level of malice that would make the corruption of language routine in America–that would take away our ability to speak a common language and understand each others real differences.

Now ask yourself, “Who does this imposed confusion benefit?”  It’s certainly not the people, whatever their economic condition.  So who does that leave?  Government.

And who runs government?  The schools?  The bureaucracies?   The regulatory agencies?  The planning agencies?  In every case, it’s the Left.

B_Imperial

Thomas Jefferson

"It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself."

Aristotle

"Only an armed people can be truly free. Only an unarmed people can ever be enslaved."

Karl Popper

“A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is nonscientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.”