The Discerning Texan

The election cycle has clearly exposed the national news media for the partisan creature that it is. In observing the information revolution that has come with the Internet, blogging, etc., and in watching the national illusion of an "unbiased" press come apart at the seams, Frederick Turner, a professor at UT-Dallas has weighed in on the high cost of this election to the mainstream media:

Remembering their professors' nostalgic stories of Vietnam protest, and indulgently encouraged by their Boomer editors, they took the war in Iraq as the ideal occasion for a counter-attack. They had a villain from Texas with an accent and an apparent ignorance of university manners, the smoldering resentments of the Florida recount, a wealth of horrific footage supplied by al Jazeera, and an expertise in spin provided both by their rhetoric professors and by the advertising profession (laundered through political campaign strategizing). How could they fail?

But what could they gain? Perhaps the next election, if the American people realize too late that their informational wells have been spiked. But if afterwards at least 40% of the public no longer believes the mainstream press and is, from the moment the election is over, furious about being lied to and vigilant to avenge itself on the perpetrators, the new president will be incapable of pressing home any of the programs desired by the aspiring Boomer professional elite that the press represents. So the gain might indeed be only a trifle.

The problem is that with the collusion of their editors the new generation of reporters chose to use their exalted position of trust in the Fourth Estate to prosecute their political ambitions, rather than -- as had the conservative talk show hosts -- doing it the hard way, by creating a soap box of their own and building a popular audience. Their anthropology and history and literary theory classes had taught them that every system of knowledge was just the servant arm of the regnant regime of power, and that therefore no respect need be given to institutions of so-called objectivity and research balance. Editorializing crept into the news pages and then right out onto the front page above the fold. The editorializing, with its suppressions, its half-truths, its word-choices, and so on, carried an odd double-entendre -- for the cognoscenti, an implicit acknowledgement that this was useful strategic rhetoric to be used for the campaign, and for the rubes, all the solemn garb of scientific or historical or judicial gravity. Talk radio is hilariously explicit about its leanings and its spin, and is honest at least in that. Internet bloggers assume that they cannot fool their readers into thinking that their propositions come from the oracular lips of Truth. They are thus more trustworthy, oddly enough, than the Gray Ladies of the traditional journalism.

In being so overtly editorial in their choice of which stories to run, in deciding which facts to report, and more importantly, which facts to omit because they do not support their failed world view, the editors in "big media" are failing to understand that the world has changed now: their tired institutions no longer monopolize the news, and the truth will find its way to the surface in a free society. The day is not far away when people will wake up and no longer care to listen or read sources of "news" that they no longer trust. Hopefully that day is upon us.

Considering the crossroads that our media has reached, it is prudent to consider that we are also rapidly approaching a crossroads as a nation. Western society (whether the French and Germans want to admit it or not...) is clearly engaged in war of survival against worldwide Islamofacism. Even in a post 9/11 world, the American media is still busy trying to support the false vision of a world that they were fed long ago by idealist journalism professors, despite much evidence that the "boo boo" will not go away now if we will just "play nice."

If it takes the vaporization of an American city to wake them up, it will be far too late for them, and for the rest of us. I think this is what drives many bloggers; I know it is what drives me. With the finest military and equipment in the world, my concern is not about our military's ability to win a long war against the tens of thousands of Muslims who see our destruction as a holy crusade. No, my concern is that this war will be lost here at home, in the court of public opinion. And that tens if not hundreds of thousands will die horrible deaths because we did not understand the consequences of not taking action now.

Our Islamist enemy knows that America has become "soft" over the years. For example during the five years of the Civil War, the country collectively had over 970,000 casualties. That was supreme sacrifice, especially considering what the total population was in 1861-65 compared to today... American society suffered an enormous loss over whether or not to stay as one Union. All those mothers who lost all those sons and husbands. Perhaps our countrymen were so much more willing to sacrifice then because they had lived under the oppression of the alternative to freedom, something we do not appreciate today.

In World War I, when our own shores were not even threatened, 117,000 souls lost their lives fighting for our Anglo Saxon brothers across the pond. In World War II, when we were attacked at home, we paid dearly for victory with the blood of 407,000 servicemen and women. Our parents or grandparents rationed food for the war effort, rationed gasoline, rationed tires, rationed everything. Women went to work in bomb factories. This was a total effort to fight evil, for ourselves and for the rest of the world.

Today our country has seemingly lost the understanding of what real sacrifice is; we have "evolved" as a country and mass culture to the point where people are more concerned about health care and prescription drugs than they are whether their Republic lives on. People are chaining themselves to trees, rioting at conferences and conventions, and comparing our president to Hitler.

Meanwhile our Islamist enemies are watching, intently: they watched our will at home erode in the Vietnam war; they know that a war we were clearly winning on the battlefield was lost at home by a public no longer willing to support it (my point here is not to debate whether or not that war's ends justified the means--my point is that our lack of will to win that war may have poisoned the well for supporting the war for our very survival now...). It is indisputable that a much weaker enemy outlasted us in Vietnam because we did not have the national will to win there (and I would be remiss here if I did not remind readers the part John Kerry also played in our national humiliation at the time...).

Since then we have fought wars with ever-evolving superior technology, and brought it home in sanitized fashion into living rooms, we have come to the point where the public is much more sensitive to any loss of life than we have ever been in our history. An existentialist would say that is a good thing. A historian would say it is foolhardiness. It is almost that people think that there is no such thing as a war that justifies any sacrifice of life. We cringe because almost one thousand men and women have died in Iraq trying to defeat those who would kill us all. And the press has become another weapon for our enemies. Tripping all over themselves to film the latest flag-draped casket and parade it before all of us out of some kind of moral superiority complex, when in reality they are the most deceptive and immoral entity of all.

Islamists are not the only enemy. Along with the elitist press, we have other socialists, communists, anarchists, and moral relativists who would willfully reduce our economy to third-world status for a shorter work week or cradle to grave health care from the mothers breast of the welfare state. And in so doing depriving us of the very weapons and wealth needed to defeat the external Islamofascist enemy.

Worse, we have a lot of other citizens who are either pretending unconsciously that either 9/11 didn't really happen, or fooling themselves that the Islamists would never really kill hundreds of thousands, if not millions of us. All we have to do is to love them and give them foreign aid, and pretend that the UN really means something. We have a public that is blissfully unaware that we can easily lose everything in one solar-like flash: if a major city goes up, the collapse of the world economy will send millions into poverty. You think job losses were bad after two skyscrapers came down? Try watching the worldwide depression that occurs if the world's most powerful economy goes up in one horrible mushroom cloud.

But many do not see things in these terms. They are lost in some childhood fantasy that their every need will be taken care of by Government, they are too busy worrying about Martha Stewart's cell and J-Lo's latest conquest to worry about a little thing like our survival. Our media, leftist politicians, and celebrity culture still have many of our fellow citizens in collective denial about the danger we are really in.

Not only have we become soft and weak-willed as a nation, we have also become more vulnerable to technology ourselves. Today we could easily lose 750,000 souls in a single afternoon. The Islamists are aware of this too. And we know what their goal is. We know they want to kill us. They have not hidden their intentions; we are the "infidels"--we are less to them than the Jews were to Hitler (p.s. the Islamists want to kill the Jews too...). We know they are trying to obtain weapons to kill hundreds of thousands of us in the wink of an eye. We know this. We know they have the mindset and the utter lack of conscience to kill all of us. We know what they have done already. We all watched in horror while it happened, and out of fear, for a brief moment thereafter, we had a national will again.

We also know that this enemy is hiding behind religion and behind nation-states like Iran. Iraq too was one of those nation-states, as was Afghanistan. Syria is one. And we have in North Korea a regime who will sell these zealots whatever weapons they want provided the price is right.

We have a United Nations that is collapsing under the weight of its own corruption. And we have a Presidential candidate who is still operating on an "it's the economy stupid" mentality. Who thinks that by patching things up with the French all our problems will magically go away. He won't tell us what he stands for in the war against radical Islam, indeed what he actually does stand for on any subject seems to change daily, depending on the audience. What was policy last week is criticized this week. And we have a press that is openly and blatantly going out of its way to paint a picture of the candidate, and indeed the world itself, that is a complete fantasy. No wonder the Islamofasicsts are so emboldened.

We are in a war for our survival as a nation, and possibly for our own individual survival as well. And, for people like me, our survival depends on our collectively waking up and no longer taking for granted this miraculous place and this amazing life we have here in the United States. We have it better than any other country on the planet. Even our poorest neighborhoods have television, air conditioning and satellite dishes. But we Americans take what we have for granted. This war is a test of our collective will to maintain our way of life, it is a test to see if we really still are "the United States". As a young nation we once were asked to make an enormous sacrifice in blood to preserve the idea of Union and freedom, and the people who lived then knew that it was worth the sacrifice. The Civil War was horrible, brutal, the very worst of warfare, but we would not be here today had they not made that great sacrifice then.

Likewise our Grandparents presided over two World Wars that also required enormous sacrifice and enormous will to persevere, and they stood the test. But none of our forefathers faced the kind of instant catastrophe we face today, nor an enemy so sinister and hidden. If we do not have the collective will as a country to do whatever is necessary to preserve our Union, again, we stand to lose everything that all of our forefathers sacrificed for. All those lives who were given for this idea, for this place, for all those generation, and for what? So we could allow the news media to take the rest of us off the cliff to its tune? If we are not willing to fight for what we have, we will lose it.

Winning the war starts with individuals who are not content to let big media paint a false picture of reality by suppressing truth and distorting facts. It starts with each of us; it starts with groups of people who rise up and demand that truth. The fight is not only a military fight, it is an ideological fight too. In order to win this war, we will have to overcome and defeat those bankrupt ideologies and people who out of their own collective ignorance would drag the rest of us into the abyss with them.

This war will end, eventually, with our having either preserved the United States, and the freedom that represents to all the peoples of the world, by sacrificing ourselves for a greater cause, and utterly defeating finally those who would kill us all; or it will end with capitulation, humiliation, and eventual catastrophe for hundreds of thousands of "innocents"; and to disaster, demoralization and depression for the rest of the planet. The choice is ours. And we are running out of time to make it.