Cross your fingers and gaze heavenward. It appears super novas John Kerry and Dan Rather are imploding into black holes. By election time they will be tiny pulsars barely audible with even the most sensitive listening devices. They and their cohorts will live out eternity in a parallel universe where they belong. Both men are products of a doctrine of propaganda, willing to use any means to achieve their goals. Both are shameless in their distortion of the facts. How did we come to elevating these two in our national constellation?
The political environment in which they rose to prominence was influenced by the star that rose in the East over Moscow in 1917 that shone a malevolent light exhorting wise men to fall on their knees and worship the intellectually provocative and pleasing religion of world socialism. In this cosmology, borders between nations are lifted, workers own the means of production, private property is forfeited and the concept of the individual is subsumed to the glory of the state.
The Bolshevik Revolution, people forget, was not just Russian. It was an international movement from the onset. The Comintern apparat was established in 1929 to achieve the goal of a world in which democratic nation states would become a part of the Soviet Socialist Republic. The KGB, as it became called, was actually an extension of the global mission, its agents the Jesuits of the socialist-communist political religion who spread lies and propaganda to discredit national leaders in the West. This evangelical mission gained adherents in Europe and the United States. Some of the converts did it for idealistic reasons; others were paid by the Soviets. To succeed, the Comintern had to bring down its rival for the hearts and souls of mankind, the United States. And that goal was what active measures propaganda was all about: America was depicted as imperialistic and racist and must be brought down so the Utopia of the world socialist revolution could succeed.
The recent revelations of KGB and GRU infiltration in the Franklin Roosevelt administrations in the 1930s and ’40s demonstrate this vividly. Some American-Soviet agents were paid and others were simply dupes, but their mission was clear. Sadly, the communist religion appealed to those certain types then as it does today. And converts then and now are often so zealous in their righteous embrace of quasi-utopian ideals they cannot discern that their activities against their own country are treasonous. They sincerely believe they are patriots for desiring the demise of nationhood, capitalism and the rights of the individual.
What is surprising is that these disciples are often intellectuals, yet they were able to deceive themselves into looking the other way when it was obvious that the Holy City of Moscow was actually a faade for socialist principles. In the Kremlin, demonic and murderous sub-humans either executed their detractors or sent them to prison camps and insane asylums for having differing views— or for no reason at all. The country that represented the glittering goals of communism was actually an abattoir that was responsible directly and indirectly for the deaths of 100 million people in its nearly 70-year reign.
The Campus Revolution
During the 1950s and the heating up of the Cold War, the idealism of the world socialists cooled, but Comintern propaganda found fertile soil on college campuses in the 1960s and ’70s where activist groups suddenly sprung from the ground with an aggressive anti-American message. Of course, Vietnam became the major issue, but civil rights, unionization of workers, the feminist and free sex movements, the American Indian movement, nuclear freeze initiatives (we disarm and the Soviets will too), the rise of “deep” environmentalists (capitalism and cars are killing us), the reduction of public school education to a “self-esteem” agenda, the ridiculous campaign to change the names of sports teams thought to be hurtful to ethnic groups and animals—all that was cooked up during the era.
Did the Movement, as it was called by its adherents, happen as a spontaneous expression of pent-up concerns? Not actually. The KGB Jesuits were working the crowds, recruiting agents and generally stirring up the pot. Former KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin told me personally that the KGB was “involved” with the Students for a Democratic Society, the well-funded anti-American activist group that organized students and arranged demonstrations against the Vietnam War. The upshot is that a generation of Americans were politicized against their country by a foreign agency.
By the 1980s, the activists who remained on campus and pursued careers in academe began trying to change history to fit their views by destroying traditional scholarship in the name of the proletariat. Off with their heads they screamed in faculty meetings, referring to the so-called “greats” of the past, normally studied and often admired, who were now deemed guilty of exploitation of the masses. After all, the leaders of the world were predominantly white European males who represented chauvinism, racism and homophobia that had to be eradicated from the curriculum—and society. In their place, and after the “greats”: have been criminalized, scholarship is to focus on the lives of the peasants and the “unempowered.” The canon of Western civilization must go, and with it, sadly, rationality and truth.
This ongoing campus warfare was not on the public mind as it waged fiercely in faculty lounges and departmental meetings. By the end of the 1980s, after an almost complete victory on campus, the agenda of the radical scholars seeped into society. Now everyone knows about “politically correct” behavior, speech codes, multiculturalism, disrespect for ideals of liberty and the attendant suspension of logical thinking required to believe in these policies.
Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, these bizarre politicized doctrines remain steadfastly in place. As do John Kerry and Dan Rather.
Fellow Travelers
Kerry was actually a participant in the trashing of American values as a member of the card-carrying Left, his Vietnam Veterans Against the War in effect a Popular Front puppet organization. His speech to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was a recitation of Soviet anti-American propaganda. His visits to the Paris peace talks, where he undermined US policy on behalf of his Soviet comrades who actually ran and supplied the war, bordered on treason and sedition. John Kerry was a “useful idiot” of rare quality, a product of the era and a real catch for Moscow—whether he knew it or not. He faithfully continued his anti-American stance in the US Senate beginning in 1984. He was against any proposal that threatened the Soviets, almost every weapons expenditure, and favored the Soviet-backed Sandinista communist regime in Nicaragua. He even actively supported a unilateral nuclear freeze. He has continued his hapless anti-American stance in his presidential campaign by undermining the morale of our armed services and calling for appeasement in place of the commitments the US has made around the globe. His defeat in November could, at long last, end the grip of the Soviet-inspired Left on American politics.
Dan The Man
Dan Rather made his name covering the JFK assassination in Dallas in 1963 for the local CBS affiliate. He made his way to the Evening News anchor position replacing Walter Cronkite while scrambling over the back of Roger Mudd, the heir apparent. At least Mudd can chortle, “I told you so,” now that Rather has destroyed his own reputation and stained the once venerable CBS news division by using - and then defending - the use of forged documents in an effort to affect the outcome of a Presidential election. The fall of Dan Rather is actually more satisfying than the coming demise of John Kerry and his agenda. Media stars, such as Rather, long ago abandoned the ethics and professionalism of journalism to force their own warped and dangerous political beliefs on the public. They have poisoned the one thing the founding fathers knew could make this Republic work—a free press. The major networks and the New York Times and the Washington Post—to name the obvious culprits—have been getting away with this since the 1970s. Only now are they caught and made to confess their crimes.
The Post-Modern Agenda
The elevation of race and gender and sexual preference has become the doctrines that dictate news coverage. This is accompanied by an outright contempt for factual history, borrowed directly from the post-modern deconstructionist radical scholars on campus. From the Janet Cooke scandal at the Washington Post in 1981 to the Jayson Blair disaster at the New York Times in 2004, the little chickens were coming home to roost. But nothing happened. New reporters are still chosen for their sensitivity to race and gender. Until Rathergate, coverage maintained a decidedly anti-American taint. It is just assumed in the newsrooms in New York and DC that the US is just what Soviet propaganda said it was: racist, imperialistic and chauvinistic and the news moves on from that premise.
Thus the current scandal at CBS is nothing new for those who follow the media. It’s actually the formula of the New Left journalists. If you know your cause is just, the facts don’t matter. It is the ends that justify the means and who’s to know? Rather was actually, to him, doing his job (“in good faith” he said). So did Janet Cooke and so has the majority of news people since. Journalism programs, so close to the campus radicals, are politicized more than any other on campus. If you want to work for the big papers or networks, be sure to be “sensitive,” express a knowing disdain for America and you are on your way.
PJ O’Rourke, the wittiest of our political pundits, who has pointed out many times the sad state of American journalism today, mentioned a quote recently from writer Charles McCarry that sums up the connection between active measures and the gullible left-wing media types: “In late 20th-century Washington, a certain politicized segment of the news media exercised many of the functions belonging to the secret police in totalitarian countries.” Dan Rather was one of these.
Their finest hour
Just as America always seems to produce the right man most of the time in moments of crisis, our basic principles reasserted themselves with the latest heroes of a free press, the “Bloggers” (slang for Web Log), the new breed of journalists, the pamphleteers who caught Rather faking documents and then lying about their authenticity. The ritual secrets of news making by CBS were exposed; no longer can they be smug that no matter what they put on the air, it flies as news.
And it was Bloggers who are exposing John Kerry’s true character. Happily, going down with him is the age of Marxist agendas and the dominance of the activist Left in party politics. And after Dan Rather’s humiliation, our laughable mass media operatives are exposed and cannot continue to cook up stories and deny the facts to sell an agenda. The Bloggers, the rise of Fox News, and even the pompous and bombastic Rush Limbaugh, like them or not, have caused a revolution. Already there are whimpers from the usual suspects, national and local, stating they plan to be more careful after Rathergate. Let’s be sure they are.
Notes from La-La Land
My favorite nutty fall-out from l’affaire Dan Rather was the reaction by the demented Terry McAuliffe of the Democratic National Committee blaming Bush advisor Karl Rove for setting up CBS to embarrass the network. This is in step with his other rants since he became the self-appointed political commander for the Democrats. He declared electoral war in Florida in 2000 and hasn’t rested his musket since. He is the unwitting Pied Piper whose hard Left antics are leading the Democrats to annihilation.
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Four Raleigh city buses converged at one intersection… they were empty. If people don’t use our current mass transit system, why is it believed they will ride a train?
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Colorado is voting on a proposition to allow electoral votes to be split by the outcome of the popular vote for President. This is a bad idea. The Electoral College was created by the founders to offset the mass hysteria and mob rule that can result from direct popular elections. The wild, wild West…