Fox News

Michelle Malkin – The Little Giant

Since I’ve decided to start writing again I’ve been going down memory lane thinking about when I last was tackling thorny issues.  Back then I actually believed I might make a difference.  I even teamed up with one of the last real investigative print reporters in America, Tom Lipscomb, in 2008, to try to expose Barak Obama’s sketchy past.  We obviously didn’t succeed.  Now I’m just picking topics that interest me, without any thought to making a difference.  Vanity posts.  But then again, I don’t expect that too many people will read them.  An online journal if you will.  Just me and the NSA.

After 2008 I gave up trying to influence people.  Luckily for America, many conservatives did not.  Given the unprecedented lawless nature of the Obama administration, it is really unthinkable where we would be today without the restraint imposed by the minute portion of the press comprised of Fox News and the conservative bloggers and writers, as well as talk radio.  Those of us who listen and watch these stations have a false sense of the penetration into what Rush calls of the “low information voters” consciousness of stories we hear every day.

One of my clients is a tech wiz, the president of a multi-million dollar tech company which develops and markets software apps.  I made a comment about IRS hard drive crashes and lost email the other day and he looked at me blankly.  He had heard nothing about it.  This was at least a week into the story, after we had heard of the second six drive crashes.

It is easy to forget how well the MSM controls the flow of information to people who for the most part get their news from the 3-minute ABC news at the top of the hour (do they even do that on music stations any more?  On network TV?  Shows how much I watch or listen…)  If Jon Stewart does not parody it, and the kids only stream music, how do millennials get any news at all?

There are a great number of conservative writers, commentators, thinkers, talking heads and personalities who have kept up the good fight over the years when I just gave up and went back to raising kids and grandkids and earning a living.  One stands above all the others in my mind, which is odd because she is the shortest of the bunch (shorter than Gregory John Gutfeld, if you can believe it).

Michelle Malkin is my hero, simply put.  She is indefatigable, and has put up with more vile abuse and crap than any ten other writers because of her sex, her race, her looks, her intelligence, her size, her courage and her conservatism.  Her “critics” (and I use that word euphemistically – more accurate terms would be “attackers”, “stalkers”, “mindless character assassins”, and “barbarous ad hominem spewers”) rarely come close to actually engaging on the playing field of ideas, instead posting vile, explicit ethnic or sexual slanders.  Michelle has in the past repeated these in good humor to expose the kind of “debate” the left engages in; it does not take much keyboard legerdemain to discover them so I will not repeat them here.  They follow certain predictable themes:

  • prostitution (she is an ethnic Filipina, as is my wife, and there was a history of prostitution in the Philippines, especially around US naval bases; ha ha, easy joke there)
  • she is really just a mouthpiece for her husband Jesse, because, you know, a Filipina couldn’t be smart enough to write the things she did
  • she’s really good looking and therefor good for just one thing; she should just shut up and lay back;
  • she’s really ugly; she should just shut up and lay back (which means they really think she is hot but are lying about it…)

An unintentional service Michelle has done for America just by existing (along with the many services she has done through her writing and speaking) is to definitively expose the bigotry and hypocrisy of the Left (Parenthetical: I don’t want to lump in all the Left with these morons, but there are enough of them – and they are not vocally denounced by the majority – that I’m going to paint with a broad brush here).  When you can get the Left to admit that slavery and racism, at least up through the 1960s, were in large part a product of the Democrats (the Confederacy, the Ku Klux Klan, Segregation, opposition to Civil Rights and desegregation, Nathaniel Bedford Forest, Bull Connor, George Wallace, Lester Maddox, Al Gore, Sr., William Fulbright, Robert Byrd, etc.), they like to say, “But we’ve changed!  Now we’re the party that cares for minorities!”  They point to things like welfare and equal employment opportunities, which in practice have devastated minority communities and families.  But even today, underlying these (perhaps well-meant) programs is a belief that has remained unchanged from the time when Democrats enslaved Africans – the belief that those of ethnicities other than white were inferior.  Prior to emancipation that meant whites could own them as property because they were inferior; now their inferiority means that you must help them, give  them special opportunities and handouts, because they are incapable of making it on their own without their superiors helping them.

When Michelle’s critics unthinkingly say she could not have the beliefs she has – conservative beliefs – or write the reasoned things she writes, or investigate and research the things she does, why, it must be the Rhodes Scholar Jesse who is doing it!  Not the diminutive Filipina.  Because… well, because she’s not white, of course.  Because it is inconceivable that she could think these things or write these things on her own, it means that their opinion of her race in general is so low that they cannot find it in their world view that such an outcome is possible so another explanation (i.e., Jesse) must be the answer.  Or maybe it is because she is a woman?  This is especially telling when it is women who are making these criticisms, as it often is.  That means that these women are insecure as to their own capabilities and don’t think they have it within themselves to achieve what Michelle has accomplished.  That’s a reflection on their sense of self-worth, not her.

Michelle takes on the toughest subjects, whether it is the taboo subject of Japanese internment (she makes the case that it was justified under the circumstances and supports her position with facts) or taking on the culture of corruption in Obama’s Washington long before the massive corruption we see today had emerged.  She goes onto campuses where she has insults shouted to her in Tagalog (the main language of the Philippines) from the audience and she is definitely a stranger in a strange land.  She remains a go-to contributor for Fox News (not O’Reilly, his loss, because of a very nasty row with the loony Geraldo Rivera who threatened to spit on her among other things), and writes columns and blogs daily, filling the role of investigative net reporter that used to be done by the major daily newspapers.  She hasn’t written a book since 2009 (she’s written four…  or has she… Jesse….?  And wasn’t Bill Ayers seen sitting at your kitchen table with a manuscript?  There are some stylistic similarities…. naw).  She’s founded three successful web sites and tweets and blogs almost daily as well as publishes syndicated columns while raising two kids.  I have enough trouble finding my shoes in the morning.

In another age she would be a celebrated reporter with Pulitzers, feted at the Correspondent’s Dinner and the White House, and be spoken of with the likes of Woodward and Bernstein, with movies made about her.  Hmmm… who would we cast to play her?  Sorry, I just don’t know today’s stars…  Myrna Loy in heavy makeup?  No, the Asian Pacific Actor’s Guild would protest.  And Myrna was taller than Greg Gutfeld anyway.  But Myrna Loy as Michelle and William Powell as Jesse…  am I showing my age?  I mean, ah, Angel Locsin and Bradley Cooper [thanks, Bing!].

Michelle Malkin is a national treasure, all the more so because she has been reviled unjustly by the Left for years but has continued the good fight.  I’m sure there have been many tearful nights that the public has never seen when she has felt the brunt of the hatred and pain where she could never give the bastards the satisfaction of seeing they had scored, for which we have Jesse to thank for seeing her through.  So, yeah, in a way the critics are probably partially right.  Behind this great woman there is a great man, supporting her.

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Love Fox News’ “The Five” – Congrats on 3 Years

Has it really been 3 years?  Let’s see…. 1,473 fund raisers…. yep, 3 years!

Greg Gutfeld is like the puppy who gets stuck in the exhaust of your RV and delays your vacation; cute but annoying.  Actually, he’s the real reason I watch The Five.  It’s not for the good looking women.  Really.  I swear.  His libertarian take is more workable in my opinion than that of Eric Bolling, who is new to that faith and a little over-eager; I’m a conservative not a libertarian but I like a lot of libertarian instincts.  I liked Eric’s commentary better before his libertarian epiphany  but still value his free market and business insights.  Some of the best byplay is between Greg and Bob Beckel; Greg knows Bob will always rise to the “liberals always…” line and Bob knows he knows and knows he must always respond nonetheless.  Greg is a master of the Frau Blucher offense.

Kimberly Giulfoyle is ever the stunning and staunch conservative; along with lovely Andrea Tantaros they are the reliable traditional conservatives of the group.  Dana Perino, while cute as a bug, is so typical of what is wrong with establishment Republicans and so oblivious of her inbred Beltway isolation that her inclusion is important if only provide contrast to the other reliably conservative ladies, just as Bob Beckel is there to provide the perspective for the traditional Democrats for traditional conservative viewers.

Juan Williams, an infrequent co-host, is a familiar FNC personality.  While perhaps a true believer like Beckel, Juan tends to raise Democrat talking points and straw man arguments too slickly and often (with a sly little grin that always makes me wonder…) for me to accept that he really believes what he is saying.  I often get the feeling this is a paycheck for him, and the character he is paid to play knows he has to take this side and he argues the side he is paid to argue.  Since Juan is justifiably proud of his son Raffi, a staunch conservative, you know Juan is exposed to the intellectual content of conservative thought and thus is more aware than most leftists that the facile and false arguments he routinely attributes to conservatives are untrue.  That he continues to claim conservatives believe these tropes would appear to be theater.

I think Beckel, on the other hand, has his patterns worn deeply into his brain through decades of partisan warfare and I think he can’t see over the top of the trenches he’s dug over the years.  He’s a good man, and a moral man, and an honest man (all on The Five are honest, don’t get me wrong), but he has always believed the bromides he has had his candidates run on (Republicans do not care for working people, they hate minorities, etc.) and even though he works every day with people who demonstrate that these are false, these false core beliefs are a part of the woof and warp of his understanding of the world and, like Javert, to accept that he is wrong at such a basic level would lead to his destruction.  I think Bob believes that the people he works with are actually the rare exceptions among conservatives, which allows him to maintain his rigid misperceptions of evil conservatives.

Or maybe I just like Beckel because with my being butt ugly, too, and having 28 years of sobriety I figure we have a lot in common.

Anyway, a great ensemble cast, always interesting, always worth watching (just more worth watching when Greg. Bob and Andrea are all there, no offense, Dana and Juan!).  Set your DVRs or, as I do, blow off your boss or clients (it’s on at 2 PM where I live most of the year, 3 PM the rest of the year because we Arizonans are ANARCHISTS!)