Mainstream media challenges Trump for evidence, but exempts self from same requirement

Many mainstream journalists challenged Donald Trump to produce video evidence supporting his claim that "thousands" of Muslims in New Jersey celebrated the 9/11 attack. (The candidate said he saw it televised in a news broadcast.)

It's a fair question. I support Trump, but understand that the burden of proof is on him. 

He offered a New York Times article dating from that time, but it spoke only of indeterminate "numbers" of celebrants - not thousands. And some Trump supporters have pointed to a CNN Anderson Cooper story from that time. But it featured only several Muslim endorsers of the 9/11 attack.

And Trump's own assertion that others now tell him they also saw thousands of New Jersey Muslims celebrating doesn't really qualify as evidence that can be examined and might sway disbelievers. Just because a person swears they once saw something does not make it so.

NBC's Chuck Todd made this point in an 11/29 Meet the Press interview with Trump. To the candidate's noting that rally attendees had shared that they, too, had seen the alleged broadcast, Todd correctly answered, "But they want to agree with you, that doesn’t make it true."

Remember that. 

Because many of Donald Trump's critics are completely without concern for video evidence, and are all-too willing to hold up unverified eyewitness testimony as definite proof, when it advances narratives dear to them. 

An Alabama activist was ejected from a November Trump rally in that state. And ever since, mainstream media voices have echoed the claim that he was "punched and kicked" by Trump supporters.

They all cite the same video clip to support that characterization. But that footage contains no depiction of "punching and kicking."

See for yourself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DPs9ZR9RI0

The crush of bodies around the activist make it impossible to see every possible action -- including the alleged "punching and kicking." So, this oft-cited video simply does not prove what so many report.

John Hinderaker of Powerline interviewed Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank on 11/25. (Hinderaker was sitting in for radio host Laura Ingraham.)

The Post had trumpeted the "punching and kicking" story. The smear that Trump and his supporters are some evil racist plague upon the electoral land is a narrative most dear to the mainstream media. 

It is, of course, spurious, foul, and counterproductive to the cause of combatting genuine racism. But the unethical find it of handy utility as a political billyclub. 

Milbank seemed to bristle when Hinderaker pointed out the Alabama rally video contained no evidence of the alleged violence. 

"My colleagues were there and saw it with their own eyes," snapped the suddenly irritable columnist. "So I'm going to take my colleagues' eyes over your videos." (At this moment, let's all remember Chuck Todd's admonition to Trump that claimed witness testimony is not satisfactory proof.)

When pressed to name these Washington Post colleagues upon whose claims the entire world is to unquestioningly rely, Todd at first demurred. Finally, he named just one: Mary Jordan, the author of numerous prior poison pen attacks on Trump. 

(I've read that at some Trump events, reporters are assigned a particular area. And I don't agree with that policy. But if Jordan actually witnessed the ejection, she had either broken an agreement to stay in the assigned reporter area or was straining to view events far away from her position and that were obscured by the crowd. In either case, not exactly an upright, reliable source.) 

On Meet The Press, Todd declared to Trump, "Just because somebody repeats something doesn't make it true...Fact-based stuff matters."

Yes, it does. In every instance, without exception.

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The Uncle Speaks

[Disclosure: the present author is a politically aware uncle.]

A political stereotype popular in quarters otherwise rightly critical of stereotyping is the loud, anti-liberalism uncle.

In the telling, he is a boorish buffoon plaguing family gatherings with right-wing diatribes inspired by "Faux News" airings. His vociferous denunciations of, say, Obama's defiant weakness as radical Islamic terrorist horrors are perpetrated, Hillary's Benghazi iniquities, or the latest campus disquiet are roundly jeered by those intolerant of all views but their own.  

This somewhat popular stereotyping is not limited to casual settings.

Saturday Night Live's Bobby Moynihan recently appeared on that show as his sloppy, befuddled "Drunk Uncle" character to loudly hail Donald Trump. The implicit message was that support of Trump and his ideas (strength, patriotism, adherence to laws) is laughable and the position only of fools.

(An NBC online description of Moynihan's loutish Drunk Uncle notes that his targets include "graduation, how students don't study real subjects in school, his life failures, and things that annoy him including E-cigarettes, Beatz by Dre and selfies.")

I'm fully aware that lampooning broad character types has real usefulness in comedy. It can help illustrate a point. Two examples are the Three Stooges' pin-pricking of pompous stuffed shirts and the acidic satirization of the Simpsons' ridiculously overly religious Ned Flanders character.

Audiences are more likely to appreciate humor if subjects presented are ones they find familiar.

Too, there is a grating gratuitousness to someone who complains endlessly about seemingly everything. Their unfocused railing indicates not just lack of ideological purpose, but that personal deficiency might well be their true issue.

But the political advantage of this stereotype warrants observation. When an entire belief system and moral/civic values store are flippantly ascribed to an exaggerated object of ridicule, all accordant ideas and ideals are simultaneously dismissed -- without individual consideration.

Forget the actual effort of listening to ideas and weighing them against others. Of thinking. 

For some, perhaps many, disposable, politics-laden entertainment product passes for serious and reliable information about world-stage figures and events. 
Baggy-pants commentators like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Jon Oliver are cited as if they were wise men.

Perhaps such reverence for diversionary sideshow gag men and disinclination to reason for oneself is wholly natural in an era of emotion-over-common sense infantilism.

Comedy is needed in a world of storm. It can serve the invaluable purposes of making life not just bearable but enjoyable, and mocking human frailties. 

I've read that Ralph Nader once told a table of fellows that after general justice was assured, humor would become the most important thing. And that his friend humorist Molly Ivins termed that the saddest thing she had ever heard.

No one enjoys a good laugh, or a good think, more than I do. But I can tell amusement from education, and understand that while they sometimes travel together, they are not interchangeable.

But don't listen to me -- I'm just an uncle.

Tolerance in name only 

A New Intolerance is nauseatingly abloom on campuses, in government bodies, and in general discourse. It is fortified by a smug delusion of moral superiority paraded by pompous, bumper sticker-slogan vomiting drones. 

This New Intolerance elevates feelings far over facts. It is profoundly nonintellectual.

Traditionally the thinking among inquisitive intellectuals who sought discussion of existential matters was that one could transcend immediate circumstances. Obviously, none could offer first-hand insights into experiences they had not lived, but it was agreed that by incorporating diverse testimonies into their general world knowledge, they were better able to understand and speak universally. 

And we do share a world, after all.

But in the New Intolerance imagining, only members of community X have any business speaking of community X. All outsiders can do, which is reviled, is mansplain, or whitesplain, or whatever-splain.

Not so long ago, many held fast to the noble ideal enunciated so well by Voltaire biographer Evelyn Beatrice Hall: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

But those today marching under the New Intolerance banner have no such impulse, no respect for opinion diversity. 

It is, of course, very possible to genuinely support others' rights to speak, associate, travel, petition for redress, etc, without sharing their every philosophy or agreeing with each decision they make.

But to many today, embracing someone's belief is a necessary component of supporting their rights. That is an illogical and immature formulation, but it is the one rallied 'round by annoyingly vociferous hectors. 

Reflect on the increasingly popular, bilious notion that it is wholly acceptable to verbally bully those expressing contrary opinions. To smear them and disrupt their affairs, doubtless as much to aggrandize oneself in the eyes of fellow PC swordsmen as anything else. 

Indeed, there are presently online efforts specifically engineered to relay complaints about private individuals whose social media words displease to their employers. The trumpeted ambition is to threaten adverse publicity for a small business and get offenders fired from their job -- for expressing an opinion.

This flatly obnoxious instinct to stamp out divergent perspectives, effect personal distress on heretics, and enshrine a particular ideology as the One True Belief 
indicates a poverty of moral character that is not ideologically exclusive. 

A line often attributed to 1930s Louisiana Governor Huey Long (but whose actual authorship is disputed) is "When Fascism comes to America, it will be called anti-Fascism!" 

And it is certainly so that garishly mounted and cartoonishly exaggerated nationalism can offer political ingress to undemocratic persuasions.

But so, too, can disingenuous, warm-hugs tolerance that refuses to abide philosophical difference and lashes out with claw and fang at the least hint of variance.

That wretch fancies itself as tolerant, and seemingly never tires of self-congratulation. But rational observers recognize New Intolerance when it looms.

Mismanaged saintliness recalled

When I was in my twenties, I was possessed of good intentions. I opposed racial and other forms of bigotry, understanding them to be plainly immoral as well as inimical to the democratic ideal. 

Unfortunately, my energies weren't always tempered by logic, reasonableness, or common sense. This led to me suspecting innocent people of untoward attitudes, and challenging them to account for misapprehended statements and actions. 

I was, I've since realized, pretty much a jerk to be around. My principles were fine enough, but I ruined what could have been noble by being chip-on-shoulder unpleasant to many who did not deserve it.

In my mind, concepts like tolerance and nondiscrimination belonged to me. I was the supreme judge of all around me. And to disagree with me, even if only by degrees, earned harsh and undue labels.

I still hold firm to those sterling, anti-bigotry principles, but today hope I'm wiser and more judicious.

The good news is, time and life experience made me more sensible. The bad news is, they may not do that for everyone.

Tarantino cop hate endorsed by Joyce Carol Oates

Quentin Tarantino has drawn much criticism for his loutish and lack-witted hate smear of American police during the Oct. 24 NYC #RiseUpOctober event.

According to Tarantino, police are "murderers," an epithet he repeated for rabble-rousing effect: "When I see murders, I do not stand by," he bellowed to a milling, placard-wielding mob. "I have to call a murder a murder, and I have to call the murderers the murderers!"

Author Joyce Carol Oates took to twitter recently, oddly defending Tarantino and venting her own distasteful anti-police bigotry:

Joyce Carol Oates ‏@JoyceCarolOates  Oct 29

It should not require unusual courage to protest police brutality as Quentin Tarantino has done but, evidently, it does.

Oates was creative -- if deceptively so. Tarantino had publicly smeared police in general as "murderers." But the upholding author dismissed inconvenient, objective reality, reinventing the director's broad-brush attack as courageous, respectable criticism merely and exclusively of brutality.

But Oates wasn't done. Her next post came soon after.

Joyce Carol Oates ‏@JoyceCarolOates  Oct 29

Ironic that police defending police brutality plan to boycott violent Tarantino films.

Again, her bilous imagining is not at all tethered to reality. In her fanciful interpretation, all police standing up for themselves against Tarantino's vile group slander are "defending police brutality."

Oates's pro-Tarantino/anti-police tweeting attracted the critical notice of USA Today.

Critics of Tarantino's foul-hearted rant now include police officials and nationwide units. Some 1000 units and 241,000 individual officers are participating in a boycott of Tarantino's films for The Weinstein Company. Departments in Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and elsewhere have called for box office retribution.

Members of the director's own family joined the growing chorus decrying the news camera-strutting anti-cop blusterer who became wealthy by churning out cookie cutter ultra-violent cinema.

Tarantino's father Tony and cousin Frank Gucciardi have each criticized the director in recent media coverage. Gucciardi is a former NYPD officer who was nearly killed in the line of duty. He is permanently disabled as a result.

In Quentin Tarantino's umbrella blaming of all law enforcement officers, Gucciardi is a "murderer." And Oates seems to agree.

Quentin Tarantino, Joyce Carol Oates, and Harvey Weinstein were all contacted for comment. None responded.