RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/02/house_hunters_a_window_on_a_derelict_culture.html

Like many people, I’ve been watching House Hunters and its cousin House Hunters International on HGTV with considerable interest, though perhaps not for the usual reasons. I understand the charm the program has for its viewers: the pleasure of visiting houses and their locales, the ideas one may get for redecorating one’s own dwelling, the information about places one may wish to visit or move to, the guessing game regarding which of the inevitable three houses the purchasers will settle for, or simply abundant material for one’s fantasy life.

But I do wonder how many viewers realize that the whole business is largely a scripted hallucination which may even be hazardous to one’s future decisions if taken seriously. And as we will see in the ensuing, it partakes as well of a progressivist rage for leftist queer and gender politics.

To begin with, House Hunters et al. paint a scrubbed and prettified picture of the subject. I recall several episodes dealing with the lovely Greek island of Paros, featuring gorgeous, well-appointed villas replete with lavish amenities including ample showers and impressive fireplaces. I lived in Greece for several years and know the island well — well enough to know that, like most Aegean islands, it suffers from critical water shortages and an equally critical lack of firewood owing to centuries of forest denudation. Showers will be few and winters will be rheumatoid. And unwary buyers will be sucking lemons.

This is only one instance of the HGTV lie. Cabo San Lucas is another popular HGTV fable, focusing on gleaming condominiums and stunning views. The hagglers, cheats, swarms of importunate vendors, heavy traffic, sewage treatment problems and evidence of extortionate prices are left on the cutting-room floor. Caveat emptor.

Moreover, dialogue and character must rank the program at the lowest end of the entertainment industry scale. The dialogue is cloyingly banal with its ceaseless empty chatter, and the prospective buyers/renovators are generally among the most vapid and unattractive cast of characters one could ever hope to avoid.

https://thehill.com/homenews/media/483884-cheney-blasts-nyt-for-publishing-op-ed-by-taliban-leader

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the No. 3 Republican in the House, slammed The New York Times for publishing an op-ed by Sirajuddin Haqqani, a deputy leader of the Taliban, arguing it was inappropriate to give the terrorist organization a platform.  

The Times published a piece by Haqqani on Thursday titled “What We, the Taliban, Want” in which the leader hails the organization’s ongoing peace talks with the United States.

Cheney took to social media to condemn the paper’s decision to publish the piece, questioning whether Haqqani was compensated for the piece, while bringing up the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States carried out by al-Qaeda, which was provided safe haven in Afghanistan by the Taliban.

“I have some questions for @nytimes since they decided to give the Taliban a forum to spew garbage, like, “We did not choose our war…We were forced to defend ourselves. 1. Remember 9/11?  2. The author is a designated global terrorist. Did you pay him for this piece?,” she tweeted on Thursday. 

The New York Times did not immediately reply to a request for comment from The Hill. 

Mujib Mashal, The New York Times senior correspondent in Afghanistan, cast doubts on Haqqani’s portrayal of himself and his organization.

“The piece by Siraj Haqqani in @nytopinion – which’s independent of our news operations & judgment – omits the most fundamental fact: that Siraj is no Taliban peace-maker as he paints himself, that he’s behind some of most ruthless attacks of this war with many civilian lives lost,” he tweeted.

Mashal also posted links to articles by the Times on Haqqani.

“I know people have strong views on this. Sorry, I can’t answer. But, as the bottom of the piece says, our Opinion editors appreciate hearing from, and are “committed to publishing a diversity of letters”. So feel free to write to them: letters@nytimes.com,” Mashal also tweeted.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/msm_going_for_new_record_4_major_outlets_run_fake_news_stories_in_only_10_hours_yesterday.html

The mainstream media have so debased themselves that their attacks on a candidate can actually drive support to the target.  This has already happened among Republicans, only 15% of whom express trust in the media.  The astronomical levels of support for President Trump among Republicans is in part due to the unfairness of the unrelenting media attacks on him.  A similar phenomenon seems to be taking place among supporters of Bernie Sanders, who react to media attacks from establishmentarian outlets by embracing him even more fervently.  They are, after all, angry about what they see as unfairness and are suspicious of the powerful.  They still see the media as among the powers that be.  See, for example, this precious moment when a voter tells MSNBC that its criticism of Bernie turned her into a supporter:

Keep it up, MSM.  You are becoming an involuntary asset for the GOP.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/rush-limbaugh-radio-genius-changed-political-landscape/

His ‘army of one,’ inspiring millions who’d been ignored, changed the political landscape.

Genius is often defined in myriad ways. One trusted criterion is the ability to do something extraordinary in a field where others could not — and doing something that perhaps will never be done again by anyone else.

By that measure, Rush Limbaugh certainly is the genius of talk radio, a genre in which he not merely excelled but that he also singlehandedly reinvented as something entirely different — and entirely more powerful and instrumental in American life — from what was imaginable pre-Limbaugh.

Even stranger still, his ascendance coincided with the presumed nadir of radio itself. It was supposedly a has-been, one-dimensional medium, long overshadowed by television. Even in the late 1980s, radio was about to be sentenced as obsolete in the ascendant cyber age of what would become Internet blogs, podcasts, streaming, and smartphone television.

Stranger still, Limbaugh has prospered through two generations and picked up millions of listeners who were not born when he first went national and who had no idea of why or how he had become a national presence.

He certainly did not capture new listeners by adjusting to the times. While tastes changed and the issues often metamorphosed, he did not. He remained conservative, commonsensical, and skeptical of Washington and those in it, as if he knew all the predictable thousand faces of the timeless progressive project, whose various manifestations reappear to mask a single ancient and predictable essence: the desire of a self-appointed group of elites to expand government in order to regiment the lives of ordinary people, allegedly to achieve greater mandated equality and social justice but more often to satisfy their own narcissistic will to power. It was Limbaugh who most prominently warned that lax immigration enforcement would soon lead to open calls for open borders, that worry about “global warming” would transform into calls to ban the internal combustion engine, and that the logical end of federal takeover of health care would be Medicare for All.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/journalist-was-fired-criticizing-ilhan-omar-daniel-greenfield/

Narmeen Choudhury spends a lot of time tweeting about Islamophobia. The daughter of Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants has claimed that she faced discrimination in the workplace. But the one man she accused of Islamophobia was fired after 22 years on the job and is now suing for justice.

Choudhury had come to work at WPIX in 2011. Ken Evseroff, the reporter she accused, had not only been working at the New York City television station since 1997, but had worked his way up the hard way. Where Choudhury had graduated from Boston U, Evseroff had come out of SUNY and had done everything from working as a reporter to laboring as a camera operator on everything from All My Children to Nightline. By the time he came to WPIX, Evseroff was a seasoned professional.

And he expected to be treated like one.

The clash between Choudhury and Evseroff encompassed not just her allegations of Islamophobia, but class, political and generational differences. Choudhury was a privileged millennial from Duchess County married to an executive director at JP Morgan. And, like many privileged millennials, the WPIX reporter had a history of building her brand and lubricating her career by alleging incidents of discrimination.

In 2015, she claimed, “my husband was called a sand n***er”.  The story didn’t seem like an especially plausible event in multicultural Manhattan in the final years of the Obama administration. And some might wonder how anyone would have guessed that her finance executive husband was Muslim.

https://townhall.com/columnists/humbertofontova/2020/02/01/communists-honor-fake-news-champion-cnn-n2560496

“Cuba is “prepared” for the possibility of Donald Trump’s reelection and the continuation of crushing US sanctions against the island, according to Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel….The Cuban president’s challenge to the Trump administration came during a tour of central Cuba last week, where CNN was given rare access to the Cuban head of state…CNN was one of three international outlets invited to accompany Diaz-Canel on parts of his trip.” (CNN, Havana, Jan. 29.)

Gosh!  I wonder why a “journalist” for the “press agency” CNN should be honored in such a manner by a totalitarian Stalinist regime that has jailed, tortured and exiled the most (genuine) journalists in the history of the Western Hemisphere? 

Perhaps a (genuine) journalist named Vicente Botin can provide a clue: 

“The Castro regime assigns 20 security agents to follow and monitor every foreign journalist. You play the regime’s game and practice self–censorship or you’re gone.” (Vicente Botin, reporter for Madrid’s El Pais who was promptly booted from Cuba for refusing to play the same sniveling, cowardly game as CNN’s “reporters” play every time they file a “story” from Cuba.)