Vitamin's Heros (NRR)
BigSpliff
3,266 Posts
win media file Alan Colmes interviews militant pro-lifer.He admits to having a donkey for his first girlfriend but categorically denies forcing two subsequent human girlfriends to have abortions.Is it real? Hell yeah.Vitamin please to give us the positive spin
Comments
I don't remember Vitamin stating he was a pro-lifer
if he did please point it out, or just say that you assume that he is cause he was for the war in iraq
I guess it's hard to believe that any sane person could buy into the lunacy of the Iraq war debacle without also accepting the other insanities of the right. Easy mistake to make...
These sort of all-right or all-left assumptions are mad wack.
Yes. School us all on "mad wack"...
For real, I mean, I'm like sooo tired of people assuming that just because I'm a baby killer I also support legalizing Marijuana. Forget it! Pot-heads can die like dirty babies for all I care. Yeah, I'm comlex.
Since you are so obviously slow when it comes to issues of right and left, I will repeat...Attempting to define people by static categories supplied to you by the media is mad wack.
Read this. So on point...
or listen here
BILL MOYERS:
The story I???ve come to share with you goes to the core of our belief that the quality of democracy and the quality of journalism are deeply entwined. I can tell this story because I???ve been living it. As Dr. Wilson said, it???s been in the news this week, including more tax on a single journalist, yours truly, by the right wing media and their friends at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. As you know, CPB was established almost forty years ago to set broad policy for public broadcasting and to be a firewall between political influence and program content. What some on its board are now doing today, led by its chairman, Kenneth Tomlinson, is too important, too disturbing, and yes, even dangerous for a gathering like this not to address it. We???re seeing unfold a contemporary example of the age old ambition of power and ideology to squelch -- to punish the journalist who tell the stories that make princes and priests uncomfortable.
First, let me assure you that I take in stride attacks by the radical right wingers who have not given up demonizing me although I retired over six months ago. They???ve been after me for years now, and I suspect they will be stomping on my grave to make sure I don???t come back from the dead. I should point out to them that one of our boys pulled it off some two thousand years ago after the Pharisees, the Sadducees and Caesar surrogates thought they had shut him up for good. I won???t be expecting that kind of miracle, but I should put my detractors on notice, they might just compel me out of the rocking chair and back into the anchor chair.
Who are they? I mean the people obsessed with control using the government to threaten and intimidate; I mean the people who are hollowing out middle class security even as they enlist the sons and daughters of the working class to make sure Ahmad Chalabi winds up controlling Iraq???s oil; I mean the people who turn faith-based initiatives into Karl Rove???s slush fund; who encourage the pious to look heavenward and pray so as not to see the long arm of privilege and power picking their pockets; I mean the people who squelch free speech in an effort to obliterate dissent and consolidate their orthodoxy into the official view of reality from which any deviation becomes unpatriotic heresy. That???s who I mean. And if that???s editorializing, so be it. A free press is one where it???s okay to state the conclusion you???re led to by the evidence.
One reason I???m in hot water is because my colleagues and I at ???Now??? didn???t play by the conventional rules of Beltway journalism. Those rules divide the world into democrats and republicans, liberals and conservatives and allow journalists to pretend they have done their job if, instead of reporting the truth behind the news, they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the news.
Jonathan Mermin writes about this in a recent essay in World Policy Journal. You???ll also want to read his book Debating War and Peace: Media Coverage of US Intervention in the Post-Vietnam Era. Mermin quotes David Ignatius of The Washington Post on why the deep interest of the American public are so poorly served by Beltway journalism. ???The rules of the game,??? says Ignatius, ???make it hard for us to tee up on an issue without a news peg.??? He offers a case in point: the debacle of America???s occupation of Iraq. ???If Senator So-and-so hasn???t criticized postwar planning for Iraq,??? says Ignatius, ???it???s hard for a reporter to write a story about that.???
Mermin also quotes public television???s Jim Lehrer, whom I greatly respect, acknowledging that unless an official says something is so, it isn???t news. Why were journalists not discussing the occupation of Iraq? ???Because,??? says Jim Lehrer, ???the word ???occupation??? was never mentioned in the run up to the war. Washington talked about the war as a war of liberation, not a war of occupation. So as a consequence, those of us in journalism,??? says Lehrer, ???never even looked at the issue of occupation.??? ???In other words,??? says Jonathan Mermin, ???if the government isn???t talking about it, we don???t report it.??? He concludes, ???Lehrer???s somewhat jarring declaration, one of many recent admissions by journalists that their reporting failed to prepare the public for the calamitous occupation that has followed the liberation of Iraq, reveals just how far the actual practice of American journalism has deviated from the First Amendment idea of a press that is independent of government.???
Take the example, also cited by Mermin, of Charles Hanley. Hanley is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Associated Press whose 2003 story of the torture of Iraqis in American prisons before a U.S. Army report and photographs documenting the abuse surfaced, was ignored by major American newspapers. Hanley attributes this lack of interest to the fact, (quote), ???it was not an officially-sanctioned story that begins with a handout from an official source. Furthermore, Iraqis recounting their own personal experience of Abu Ghraib simply did not have the credibility with Beltway journalists of American officials denying that such things happened.???
Judith Miller of The New York Times, among others, relied on that credibility, relied on that credibility of official but unnamed sources when she served essentially as the government stenographer for claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. So the rules of the game permit Washington officials to set the agenda for journalism, leaving the press all too simply to recount what officials say instead of subjecting their words and deeds to critical scrutiny. Instead of acting as filters for readers and viewers sifting the truth from the propaganda, reporters and anchors attentively transcribe both sides of the spin invariably failing to provide context, background or any sense of which claims hold up and which are misleading.
I decided long ago that this wasn???t healthy for democracy. I came to see that news is what people want to keep hidden, and everything else is publicity. In my documentaries, whether on the Watergate scandal thirty years ago, or the Iran-Contra conspiracy twenty years ago, or Bill Clinton???s fundraising scandals ten years ago, or five years ago the chemical industry???s long and despicable cover up of its cynical and unspeakable withholding of critical data about its toxic products, I realized that investigative journalism could not be a collaboration between the journalist and the subject. Objectivity was not satisfied by two opposing people offering competing opinions, leaving the viewer to split the difference. I came to believe that objective journalism means describing the object being reported on, including the little fibs and fantasies, as well as the big lie of people in power.
In no way ??? in no way does this permit journalists to make accusations and allegations. It means, instead, making sure that your reporting and your conclusions can be nailed to the post with confirming evidence.
This is always hard to do, but it???s never been harder. Without a trace of irony, the powers that be have appropriated the Newspeak vernacular of George Orwell???s 1984. They give us a program vowing no child will be left behind, while cutting funds for educating disadvantaged children; they give us legislation cheerily calling for clear skies and healthy forests that give us neither, while turning over our public lands to the energy industry. In Orwell???s 1984 the character Syme, one of the writers of that totalitarian society???s dictionary, explains to the protagonist, Winston, ???Don???t you see? Don???t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050 at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we???re having right now. The whole climate of thought,??? he said, ???will be different. In fact, there will be no thought as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking, not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.???
Hear me: an unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda is less inclined to put up a fight, ask questions and be skeptical. And just as a democracy can die of too many lies, that kind of orthodoxy can kill us, too.
...
I agree that the sort of divisiveness that is being encouraged these days is ultimately destructive, but I also believe a vote for Bush is a pro-life vote regardless of how you personally feel on the matter... and Vitamin (who's not even here anymore, right?) was a Bush voter
My message appears not to have been clear enough. I did not say I agreed with Spliff (in regard to his assumptions about Vitamin, who has never - as much as I can remember - espoused cultural right-wingism as a side dish to his warmongering). I said that such assumptions are easy to make.
The military/industrial right wing has gone to bed with dogs and woken up with cross-burning, abortion doctor killing, bible thumping fleas.
If they don't like that they (the members of the consituency known as the "right wing") need to have a talk with the more opportunistic members of their cabal about hooking up with nutjobs to get votes. Such actions have consequences.
Thinking that people can be defined by who they vote for...even madder wack.
Dude...get off the PIPE!!!!
He's one of my favorite posters on this board.
And Archaic is right about the all-left all-right shit. That type of simplified binary opposition is pathetic and insulting and really counter-productive.
blah.
-e
I'm only guessing here, but Vitamin made himself the cornerstone of the Soulstrut Young Republicans/Bush War Cheerleaders, and whether or not he's actually around, this stain remains.
Don't make the mistake of taking a single, accidental moment of clarity from Archaic and inflating it into the idea that he knows what he's talking about. He consistently spouts an endless stream of conspiracy lunacy and crack-pottery. His assumption that I follow an all-right/all-left binary is incorrect. I judge politicians and public "servants" by their actions and how often these action contradict their public statements.
I'm going by how you treat people on this board when it comes to politics. You think you're on some sort of higher ground. But in reality you're just as hoodwinked as the folks you loathe.
he does have a point f16, i like you but sometimes you do sound like the rightwing christian coalition type but in reverse. you are kinda like an evangelical democrate
That's odd...I remember 50+ million of "the people" voting against Bush and the war. As for the 57 million or so that voted for Bush and/or the war, they, like those that voted "against" probably did it for a variety of reasons. Whether the pro-Bush folks were in any way manipulated by an unending stream of lies and propaganda from the government, or suggestions by their religious leaders that "God" was somehow on Bush's side, or led to believe that their lives were in danger (especially ironic since those that were most directly affected by the events of 9/11 voted overwhelmingly against[/b] Bush...), or ignored the fact that the current administration (with the help of many "in name only" Democrats) continued to institute economic policies that are not in the best interest of the middle/working class/poor...does that make them "idiots" or dupes or whatever? You figure it out.
As far as wearing the mantle of "the people's party", I think your sights should be turned to the Toby Keith-isms of the Republicans, who consistently cast the Democrats as the party of "intellectuals".
Spare me. I'm as likely to take political/ideological chastisement from you as I am from Dr. Loony Spacship Lizard Man. Please....
I was tryin to give Archaic some credit and then he's says this stupid shit.
Yes...my delusion knows no bounds. Thank you Socrates...
Being informed (especially with regards to practicing journalism) is letting evidence guide your conclusions. This approach is currently the exception rather than the rule. Evidence is collected to support predetermined conclusions.
Why do so many folks who are against the war think that identifying with Dems and taking on Democratic strategies is any sort of reasonble means of protest? The Dems in Congress just like the Repubs voted for the war. Then the Dems put up a presidential candidate who not only voted for the war and said that he still would today (that was last year actually) but also said that if elected he would escalate the war effort?
Point being that being tricked by hypocrites into hating right-wingers as the only evil hawks in existance is little to be proud of as well as being completely unproductive when it comes to ending the war.
For instance I am against the war, but as soon as the argument on either side gets dragged into this embicilic left versus right dialiectic...I'm not trying to associate myself with any of it.
Ultimately we need to work these issues out apart from the definitions of the (and yes, this is as sweeping as it gets) the wholly destructive American political establishment.
Interesting too, how my previous valid point gets shit on because I'm merely suspected to believe in lizard people. More of the same, correct?
And I stand by my Dems only support democracy when it suits them point. In regard to the 2000 election if Dems were able to actually prove what they claim without throwing so much of their own cheating onto the fire, then the story would have ended differently. Either way at this point the 2004 election confirmed the results of 2000.
Someone asked to have Icke's lizard people theories explained. I've read up on them so I explained them. Since then everyone on soulstrut assumes that I beleieve them to be 110% true...even though I don't.
I completely agree--binary thinking has had a terrible effect on this country. The thing is, Bush is the one who has thrust it to the forefront with his "either you love me or you love terrorism" schtick, completely discounting the millions of people who love neither of the above. And that's just one example--our current government (and discussion thereof) is dominated by binary thinking. It's definitely a trap to fall into that mode of thought, but it's a trap primarily laid by the far right.
Speaking of which, look for something bad to happen to Bill Moyers sometime soon after he (correctly) took shots at the far right wing.
I can't possibly do it justice here, explaining it in a few sentences is no good.
A good primer is Rule by Secrecy by Jim Marrs, he is much more professional in his style of writing than Icke. It covers most of the basics of conspiracy literature, and he outlines the Annunaki stuff in there too.