Aside from the performative displays of anguish–possibly sincere, in a bizarre way–note the total lack of interaction among mourners at monuments to recently deceased North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il.

Orwell’s great insight into totalitarianism was that it destroys all capacity for human intimacy, and replaces normal emotions with manipulable mania–and here’s further, chilling evidence.

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Sarah Palin practices politics as lap dance, and we’re the suckers who pay the price. Members of our jaded national press corps eagerly stuff hundred-dollar bills into her G-string, even as they wink at one another to show that they don’t take her seriously.

- Joe McGinniss, The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin

It seemed odd that Joe McGinniss’s new biography of Sarah Palin had received so many poor reviews from media outlets typically hostile to the former Alaska governor.

After I read it, the reason became clear: The Rogue is so lurid, malicious, and self-evidently false that Palin’s opponents fear it will undermine their cause. It also reveals more about the shared mindset of the left and the mainstream media than many journalists would care to admit.

McGinniss seems driven by an irrational hatred of Palin. That is apparent from the nasty charges he makes about her, which are not only sensational but also self-contradictory. His malevolent accusations evoke George Orwell’s observation on antisemitism: “Obviously the charges made about Jews are not true. They cannot be true, partly because they cancel out, partly because no one people could have such a monopoly of wickedness.”

Take McGinniss’s most infamous claim, leaked days before The Rogue appeared in stores–the accusation that Palin had sex with basketball player Glen Rice in 1987. The charge appears in the book exactly one page after McGinniss claims Palin declined to enroll at the Hilo campus of the University of Hawaii because “the many people of color there made her nervous,” and that she later abandoned the Honolulu campus because “[t]here were people of color…even on Waikiki Beach.” McGinniss attempts to explain the abrupt transition by speculating that she might have become “a basketball groupie who’d begun to find black men attractive.” And then, on the very next page after that, he quotes an unnamed “friend” who claimed that Palin “totally flipped out” about her alleged encounter with Rice: “I fucked a black man! She was just horrified. She couldn’t believe that she’d done it,” the alleged “friend” claims (original emphasis).

Other contradictions recur throughout the book. McGinniss can’t decide, for example, whether Palin was a “housewife who happened to be governor” (quoting Gary Wheeler, a state employee whose job she cut), or that Palin neglected her maternal duties such that “the children literally would have a hard time finding enough to eat” (quoting an unnamed “friend”). The only common theme is McGinniss’s palpable hatred for Palin.

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It’s come to this. The totalitarian Ministry of Newspeak er, I mean Media Matters for America has so much Soros money that they actually employ a guy to watch what we are saying on Twitter, even if it’s trash talk with buddies over a football game.  I’m not joking.  Even more outrageous, all of the thousand-plus contributors here at “The Bigs” are under this scrutiny.  And whenever any of us do something that the self-appointed thought-police at MMfA deem worthy of criticizing, we are all labeled with the same moniker:  “Andrew Breitbart Blogger.”  Here’s how they came after me, for sending a Tweet about an NFL game:

Let’s start at the beginning:  First of all, I am an American man.  Being an American man, I love the NFL.  I am also from Detroit.  Being an American man from Detroit who loves the NFL, it therefore goes to reason that I hate the Chicago Bears.  Everyone with me so far? (I’m trying to make this so simple that even the joyless, agoraphobic shut-ins like those staffing MMfA will understand.)

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The blogosphere is all abuzz over yesterday’s comments from Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, in which he opined about the annoyance of today’s cable news television programming.  Apparently cable news gets in the way of his desire for American citizens to do nothing but worship our government, rather than challenge it.

We need new catalysts for quality news and entertainment programming.  I hunger for quality news.  I’m tired of the right and the left.  There’s a little bug inside of me which wants to get the FCC to say to FOX and to MSNBC: Out. Off. End. Goodbye. It would be a big favor to political discourse; our ability to do our work here in Congress, and to the American people, to be able to talk with each other and have some faith in their government and more importantly, in their future.

Many are making this solely about the issue of the Fairness Doctrine or of Net Neutrality.  And to some extent, this is true.  But there really is a much larger picture at play here – a transition period to government-run media.

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Last week, Drummond Pike took his FOX News fight to a whole new level, this time painting all of the right with a scarlet letter.  Coincidentally, Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald had also published a similar piece in much the same vein, only a week prior.

In his opinion contribution piece to Politico titled “Why Does the Right Hate Soros?”, the founder and CEO of Tides Foundation pondered aloud the imaginary reasons he’s fabricated in his mind for the animosity toward the Hungarian born billionaire.

His conclusion?  Because we hate immigrants.

This is the typical left.  When you don’t get the response you want, inject a new element of manufactured hate into the mix – when you can’t make it about race, make it about immigration.  Drummond Pike even decided to step up the rhetoric, implying that George Soros is in danger because of right-wing media outlets and bloggers.  But the sad truth behind this piece, behind all of these public letters, boycotts and petitions is that they are all coordinated, and they are all aimed at turning the public opinion against those who do not share the ideals of the leftist agenda.

Some highlights from Pike’s opinion piece:

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For the last few weeks, I’ve been finalizing some intensive research and was in the process of writing up a multi-part post that was to be published after the mid-term elections.  One of the installments in the series will focus on the left’s push for a public takeover of the media – touching upon everything from the historical aspect of traditional media’s financial collapse, to the left’s “Media Reform” project and “New Public Media” plan, to the complete portfolio of George Soros’ media investments.

However, in light of the most recent onslaught of attacks against Andrew Breitbart and the Big sites, I thought it might be prudent to extract a few different elements from this future series and publish an early post today.  Because given the concerted efforts to use a variety of media and advocacy outlets to manufacture falsehoods in an attempt to intimidate and silence the voice of conservatives, I thought it important for others to see how –and why – some of these media outlets are connected.  Because it extends well beyond Media Matters, NPR, and Huffington Post.

While the debate continues to rage over the prospect of defunding National Public Radio (NPR) of its federal taxpayer dollars in the wake of Juan Williams’ firing, the left is busy tending to its strategy.  They’ve once again taken to opining about their Utopian notion of a national public media system, hoisting it as the antidote to partisan viewpoint peddling.  And by partisan viewpoints, they mean those that aren’t *their* viewpoints.

The left’s fantasies were further spotlighted by several recent developments in the media industry, only weeks and days apart from one another.

• On October 2, NPR announces $1 million grant from the Knight Foundation
• On October 7, Center for Public Integrity, an often cited source for liberal journalists, announces a $1.7 million grant from the Knight Foundation.  CPI has also received millions in funding from George Soros’ Open Society Institute, including another recent grant of $100,000.
• On October 17, NPR announces a $1.8 million grant from George Soros’ Open Society Institute
• On October 18, the Huffington Post announces the merger of its non-profit journalism arm into the Center For Public Integrity, with an additional $250,000 grant from the Knight Foundation for the merger.
• On October 20, Media Matters announces a $1 million grant from George Soros’ Open Society Institute
• On October 26, Google announces a $2 million grant to the Knight Foundation for media innovation

In the midst of this funding blitz, the left quickly summoned its boycotts and attempts at silencing voices against the right: (more…)

We use the power of persuasion first. If it doesn’t work, we try the persuasion of power.                 – Andy Stern, SEIU

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

There are only two kinds of government. Limited Government (LG) which limits the powers of the people at the top, which limits their ability to corrupt the system, and Big Government (BG) which is designed so a small elite group at the top reap all the benefits of a society and there is no limit on what they can do with their power.

All the names for forms of government like socialism, communism, fascism, etc. are merely definitions of style. BG systems all eventually drift toward some form of tyranny until they collapse from their own corruption or revolution. The most successful and stable form of government in modern times is the LG federalist model of the United States. But that has been corrupted, and now is changing into a BG system where it is doomed to fail unless events change it back.

I’ve tried to cover the history as much as I could in the limited space I had, but today I want to explore what it all means. First I highly recommend two documentaries that will help put a lot of things in perspective if you haven’t seen them. They were both made by Adam Curtis, a British film maker. The first is The Century of Self which talks about how elites have used psychology to help manufacture consent. The other is The Trap which talks about how liberal thinking helped create the nightmare bureaucratic world we live in today. Curtis has a leftward tilt, but he’s even-handed. The information he relates is well worth your time. (more…)