2aguy
Diamond Member
- Jul 19, 2014
- 112,241
- 52,463
Victor Davis Hanson......a more sober, deep thinker you will not find.......and here he explains how the Greek concept of "Nemesis" is now biting the democrats, their minions in the media and in the government bureaucracy...on their collective asses.....of course he is much more dignified in his explanation....
He discusses Fake News, the allegations of Trump working with the Russians, the alleged wire tapping of Trump and his people....and how the morons on the left keep getting their asses kicked.....
The Ancient Laws of Unintended Consequences
The classical idea of a divine Nemesis (“reckoning” or “downfall”) that brings unforeseen retribution for hubris (insolence and arrogance) was a recognition that there are certain laws of the universe that operated independently of human concerns. Call Nemesis a goddess. But it was also simply an empirical observation about collective and predictable human behavior: Excess invites unexpected correction.
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FAKE NEWS
“Fake news” was a term the Left invented to describe the ancient practice of propaganda (updated in the Internet age to drive Web traffic). They applied it to the supposed Russian habit of planting international news stories to affect Western elections, and in particular Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency and his tendencies to exaggerate and massage the truth.
But once the term caught on in our faddish age, who were the more appropriate media fakers? Fake news now serves as a sort of linguistic canary to remind the public that it is customarily saturated with a lethal gas of media disinformation.
Thus “fake news” seemed a proper if belated summation and clarification of years of liberal bias in the media that were supposed to be our custodian of the truth.
Were NBC anchor Brian Williams’s fantasies fake news? Were Dan Rather’s “fake but accurate” Rathergate memos? How about the party line circulated in JournoList or the Washington and New York reporters who colluded to massage the news to favor the Clinton campaign, as revealed in the Podesta WikiLeaks trove?
Was jailing a video maker part of an Obama-administration fake-news attempt to blame Benghazi deaths on a spontaneous riot? Was the Iran Deal’s “echo chamber,” about which Ben Rhodes later bragged, the epitome of fake news?
Thank the Left, because suddenly the term “fake news” is becoming a common description of the media’s effort to suggest that Trump once went to Moscow to frolic with prostitutes, that his lawyer met Russians in Prague, that he removed Martin Luther King’s bust from the Oval Office, that he was going to employ “100,000” guardsmen to enforce immigration law, or that he wished to invade Mexico.
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THE RUSSIAN CAN OF WORMS
In the latter months of the 2016 campaign, the Clinton team floated the narrative that Trump was colluding with Russian president Vladimir Putin, who in turn was engineering leaks to increase Trump’s unlikely chance of becoming president.
At first, alleging Russian collusion with Trump was a strange strategy, given that Hillary Clinton herself, as the primary agent for the Obama-administration outreach to Putin, had pushed the red Russian reset button in Geneva.
And it was quite an outreach: the shelving of long-established plans to build missile-defense shields in Eastern Europe, the open-mic promise by Obama to be more flexible with Putin after Obama’s reelection, the anemic response to the de facto annexation of the Crimea and eastern Ukraine, the constant trashing of the Bush administration as too harsh on Russia, and the ridicule showered on Mitt Romney for his supposed naïveté in naming Russia as America’s “Number One geopolitical foe.”
In addition, the Trump plans of encouraging domestic oil production, updating strategic weapons, and beefing up the defense budget were not agendas conducive to Russian interests.
Their Obama antitheses were.
He discusses Fake News, the allegations of Trump working with the Russians, the alleged wire tapping of Trump and his people....and how the morons on the left keep getting their asses kicked.....
The Ancient Laws of Unintended Consequences
The classical idea of a divine Nemesis (“reckoning” or “downfall”) that brings unforeseen retribution for hubris (insolence and arrogance) was a recognition that there are certain laws of the universe that operated independently of human concerns. Call Nemesis a goddess. But it was also simply an empirical observation about collective and predictable human behavior: Excess invites unexpected correction.
--------
FAKE NEWS
“Fake news” was a term the Left invented to describe the ancient practice of propaganda (updated in the Internet age to drive Web traffic). They applied it to the supposed Russian habit of planting international news stories to affect Western elections, and in particular Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency and his tendencies to exaggerate and massage the truth.
But once the term caught on in our faddish age, who were the more appropriate media fakers? Fake news now serves as a sort of linguistic canary to remind the public that it is customarily saturated with a lethal gas of media disinformation.
Thus “fake news” seemed a proper if belated summation and clarification of years of liberal bias in the media that were supposed to be our custodian of the truth.
Were NBC anchor Brian Williams’s fantasies fake news? Were Dan Rather’s “fake but accurate” Rathergate memos? How about the party line circulated in JournoList or the Washington and New York reporters who colluded to massage the news to favor the Clinton campaign, as revealed in the Podesta WikiLeaks trove?
Was jailing a video maker part of an Obama-administration fake-news attempt to blame Benghazi deaths on a spontaneous riot? Was the Iran Deal’s “echo chamber,” about which Ben Rhodes later bragged, the epitome of fake news?
Thank the Left, because suddenly the term “fake news” is becoming a common description of the media’s effort to suggest that Trump once went to Moscow to frolic with prostitutes, that his lawyer met Russians in Prague, that he removed Martin Luther King’s bust from the Oval Office, that he was going to employ “100,000” guardsmen to enforce immigration law, or that he wished to invade Mexico.
------
THE RUSSIAN CAN OF WORMS
In the latter months of the 2016 campaign, the Clinton team floated the narrative that Trump was colluding with Russian president Vladimir Putin, who in turn was engineering leaks to increase Trump’s unlikely chance of becoming president.
At first, alleging Russian collusion with Trump was a strange strategy, given that Hillary Clinton herself, as the primary agent for the Obama-administration outreach to Putin, had pushed the red Russian reset button in Geneva.
And it was quite an outreach: the shelving of long-established plans to build missile-defense shields in Eastern Europe, the open-mic promise by Obama to be more flexible with Putin after Obama’s reelection, the anemic response to the de facto annexation of the Crimea and eastern Ukraine, the constant trashing of the Bush administration as too harsh on Russia, and the ridicule showered on Mitt Romney for his supposed naïveté in naming Russia as America’s “Number One geopolitical foe.”
In addition, the Trump plans of encouraging domestic oil production, updating strategic weapons, and beefing up the defense budget were not agendas conducive to Russian interests.
Their Obama antitheses were.