Six Impossible Things

As the US at last gets to vote on the most important election in human history (it must be, to judge from the legion of BBC staff running around over here to cover it), the BBC’s coverage of the whole scene has been making me think of the following from Through the Looking Glass:

‘I can’t believe that!’ said Alice.

‘Can’t you?’ the Queen said in a pitying tone. ‘Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.’

Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said ‘one can’t believe impossible things.’

‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’

The BBC definitely wants you to believe some impossible things when it comes to the President and the current situation in the US. You’ll most likely hear some of these at some point today during the BBC’s wall-to-wall coverage.

(NOW UPDATED TO INCLUDE LINKS, because defenders of the indefensible have decided to be intellectually dishonest today and pretend they’ve never read anything on this blog. I’ll add more later today and this evening when I have more time. Everyone is welcome to post examples in the comments.)

1. Tea Party-led Republican intransigence has blocked His every move for the last two years, but the President has saved the economy, and we’re on the road to recovery.

2. The country is more divided and polarized than it has ever been before due to Tea Party and Right-wing media rhetoric, while at the same time you’re expected to believe that the President did not begin His term in office by sitting down to the negotiating table and telling Republicans, “I won”, and that He has not said or done anything divisive, ever.

3. The Democrat super-majority in Congress – absolute control of both houses – for His first two years which let Him do whatever He liked (except pass a budget, which even the Dems in the Senate weren’t stupid enough to vote for) without bothering to get a single Republican vote, was a Golden Age of Congress getting things done.

4. The only real reason people are voting against the President is racism, or crypto-racism, even though nobody complained when George Bush had a black man and then a black woman as the second-most powerful person in his Administration, and the Tea Party movement was ready to support Herman Cain. All those people who voted for The Obamessiah in 2008 and are not voting for Him today have suddenly reverted to being racist.

5. It’s perfectly natural for Hispanics to vote for their own kind, and want more of their own kind to come to the US. Any laws which impede that are immoral, and the only reason to oppose this kind of racialist thinking is racism.

6. Romney, like George Bush, is a walking gaffe machine, and the President has made only two minor missteps in five years (including the 2008 campaign).

No, thank you. I’m off to vote as soon as I finish my breakfast.

Intellectual classes have abandoned public service for power.

 

The BBC have long refused to talk about immigration to the UK and its downsides……they now do talk about immigration….but usually immigration in other countries.….where they cherry pick what they like as ‘proof’ that immigration is beneficial…and ipso facto will be to the UK.

The BBC of course sets the limits on the debate.…what can be talked about and indeed the way the debate is set up.

‘There is a complicated system of illusions and self deception that are the given framework for most discussion and debate.  And if you don’t happen to take part in this system of illusions and self-deception, what you say is incomprehensible.’

We had a discussion about immigration recently but it was Labour leader Ed Miliband’s guru, Prof  Sandel, who was wheeled on to bang the drum for immigration….sorry, to have an open debate about it….and we have this as a classic example of the BBC ‘fixing’ the way we perceive immigration…..they bring on a Mexican family, parents and all three kids, who have lived  illegally, …sorry, ‘undocumented’…in the US for 20 years.
Why do the BBC do this?….purely to make it all ‘personal’…..make an immigrant a ‘real person’ not just a statistic and the BBC think it’s going to be hard for someone to say they can’t come into the country….or if they do anyone listening to them will think they’re just plain old ‘nasty’ and ‘rightwing’…

‘Honest people will have to face the fact that they are morally responsible for the predictable human consequences of their acts.’

…..in other words  the BBC is fixing the debate so that it is hard for anyone to say anything the BBC disapproves of….or if they do they have to qualify it so much that it makes their statement worthless.

An interesting comment by the BBC presenter was that she thought that the illegal, sorry, undocumented, immigrants would be ideal Republicans…..with family and religion being at the centre of their values.

So Democrats don’t rate the Family and Religion then?  Which could account for a lot…..here in the UK as well.

FREE THINKING RADICALS

Just adding to what David has already posted about Marr’s programme and the BBC’s coverage of the ‘Living Wage’.

All in all today on the BBC seemed like one extended Labour Party Political Broadcast.  We had Victoria Derbyshire giving an unopposed voice to the Fire Brigade Union who have a poster out now about The Cuts saying…. ‘They cut, You burn’.   Didn’t hear any voice to naysay their propaganda.

Then we get onto Ed Miliband’s latest wheeze…the Living Wage….a policy that seems in direct opposition to everything that Labour was meant to stand for….that the rich pay more and that money is redistributed to the less well off….in effect Big Business and the wealthy subsidise small business and the poorest.  The Living Wage, as said before, seems designed to end this relationship…..with Small Business  being forced to pay wages they can’t afford.

It may come as a surprise but we already have a living wage…it’s what you earn topped up by tax credits or any other allowances you might get .…..paid for by taxing the better off and big business….not to mention the NHS, schooling, the emergency services and any other service provided by the State…..pay for that lot yourself and the living wage would be have to be a bit higher than £7.45.

It was telling who the BBC brought on to prop up their propaganda on one show…..A Labour spokeswoman, Rachel Reeves, a TUC spokesman and the BBC’s own accountants, KPMG, who love the living wage.

As David has said not one critical voice was heard until ‘The World at One‘…Today did seem like a BBC show case for Labour’s exciting new policy.

Still no answer as to where the money comes from to pay for all this.

The BBC told us that ‘The Living Wage Foundation’ has announced that the Living Wage will rise across the nation…..you might have got the impression that this was a government body of some sort…rather than what it is…a campaigning pressure group for leftwing utopian dreams.

This, if anything, is a classic example of the power of the media….a pressure group working in tandem with a friendly media to push its own ideology…..and because the most powerful of the media give it their backing the politicians who might normally have doubts about it  all run scared and ‘sign up’ to it in the hope that the BBC et al won’t then make them look ‘nasty’ just because they ask a few questions such as ’where does the money come from and how many jobs will this cost?’…the BBC are happy to complacently assure us that the living wage would be ‘Lifting the poor out of poverty’ but refused to divulge who pays.

Andrew Marr’s show, ironically linked to the BBC’s ‘Free Thinking Festival’, was pure propaganda touching on just about every BBC sacred cause….Israel, immigration, climate change and a new world order…..and no ‘voices of dissent’ to challenge any of the BBC’s cherished sympathies.

The overall narrative was about how to change the political makeup of the West…they were talking about the lack of democracy in the West, carrying on the BBC’s seeming long term project  to challenge the legitimacy of Western democracy…..they spoke of the need for ‘consensus politics‘….but what that boils down to is a one party state where all Parties follow the same policies and the public don’t have a real choice…a dictatorship in essence….and because the main, most powerful media also are in on the ‘consensus’ there is absolutely no ‘opposition’….in other words the situation we have in Britain today where politicians force immigration, Europe, Islam and wind farms upon the people without allowing them a say.

This is of course an idea advanced by the BBC’s pet Marxist (aside from Mason), Martin Jacques, as posted about earlier…making the case for ‘benign’ dictatorship.

We are told by Marr and Co that everything is polarised now in the US…..political parties  don’t have the same policies as each other and that is terrible…. that’s a bad thing….I always thought that was kinda the way a democracy worked.

The problem is that America is too democratic….even Richard Black saw this as a problem……

THE US POLITICAL SYSTEM
Just about every other country involved in the UN talks has a single chain of command; when the president or prime minister speaks, he or she is able to make commitments for the entire government.
Not so the US. The president is not able to pledge anything that Congress will not support, and his inability to step up the US offer in Copenhagen was probably the single biggest impediment to other parties improving theirs.
Viewed internationally, the US effectively has two governments, each with power of veto over the other.
Doubtless the founding fathers had their reasons. But it makes the US a nation apart in these processes, often unable to state what its position is or to move that position – a nightmare for other countries’ negotiators.

 

Yes, Democracy is a bit of a nightmare unlike lovable old Chinese Communism.

Not only do we have polarisation of politics but we also have a polarisation of the media.…which is also dangerous….Fox News anyone?  Not the BBC or the Guardian of course.……we need to have a common reference that provides a common link to all…a Public Broadcasting Service that talks to everyone…..we absolutely need the BBC.

Unfortunately that is precisely what the BBC doesn’t do…and is the reason for this blog’s existence…the BBC speaks only for itself and its fellow travellers on the Left.  It not only refuses to allow discussion of the ‘Right’s’ issues but actively works to discredit anyone who dares to attempt to publish or broadcast such ideas and thoughts.

We were also told that we have no neighbourliness anymore….no doubt one of the evils of the consumer/capitalist/freethinking society…helping each other out is a new phenomenon….I’m not sure what planet they are living on but certainly where I live people are always swinging into action in the interests of that funny old thing called a ‘community’.

Here’s a thought though….should there be a lack of such communal empathy might that be a result of people having all responsibility for their own lives being taken over by the State?

We are also informed that we must have someone in charge who knows what it is to be poor or from an ethnic minority……how childish and simplistic….and merely parroting Miliband’s pathetic and discriminatory posturing……isn’t Miliband himself a ‘millionaire’?  Is Miliband black, or a woman, or gay, or Muslim or a Welsh hill farmer?  No?  then how can he speak for such people?   Surely he is ‘out of touch’.  A ridiculous notion and one the BBC should not be championing.

Then we had ‘Climate change‘…to tackle this we need a ‘Common Purpose’…we need to change course….that is, close down industry and build lots and lots of wind farms or else we will be inundated with 200m climate refugees by 2050….and storms like ‘Sandy’ which we all know was caused by man made global warming…..er except it  wasn’t.

Then we had….The Palestinians have a right to the land of Israel…presumably the Sikhs and Hindus kicked out of ‘Pakistan’ can have their lands back then?  No?  Oh and the  current Israeli government is wrong and dangerous…..it does not want a two state solution and that’s very worrying…the only Palestinians who don’t want it are fanatics and extremists.

No mention that Palestinians want to wipe the Jews off the face of the earth….and have been  trying to do so for at least 60 years…..with the help of their  Muslim  neighbours.

But at least we now know….only a government that has policies the BBC agrees with is valid and acceptable.

Marr is well named….’Marring’  …to spoil or impair….a suitable description of what he does to the reputation of the once great BBC now brought so low.

 

Don’t Blame Him

As if all the other BBC reporting isn’t enough, they got their (freelance) World Service economics correspondent to ask, in the usual manner of journalists posing a question to which they’ve already decided the answer, if the poor US economy is the President’s fault.

US economy: Who to blame for poor economic performance?

Short answer: No.

Long answer: The economy really isn’t that bad if you consider it in historical context, and no, only some people say it’s His fault for not doing enough to fix it.

The opening section is devoted to telling you how the economy really isn’t as all that bad from an historical perspective. Moreover, the US doesn’t look so bad at all compared to the current European situation, as well as Japan. In fact, the latest quarterly figures show the US has made up all lost ground, and is now doing better than before the recession! Never mind the massive debt, or the continuously rising deficit, or the fact that the latest GDP bump is mostly due to the Fed printing more money we don’t have. So before we even get to assigning blame, we’ve softened the blow considerably, and in fact might even cause some people to wonder what’s the point of assigning blame at all.

This follows on Walker’s report from the other day defending the President on unemployment, where he dutifully regurgitated the latest jobs report without mentioning that previous jobs figures keep getting revised down. So when he then tells you that Romney will be lying if he now claims that the President has presided over a net jobs loss, you don’t actually know the whole truth. Interestingly, the last two lines of that piece are actually a set-up for this one.

In any case, now that Walker has established his premise that the economy really isn’t so bad if you think about it, he sets about pretending to ask if the President is to blame.

For the “It’s not His fault, you see” side, he links to a Bloomberg opinion piece by two economic academics explaining the historical context, and declaring that the current doldrums are nothing unusual. In fact, they say, history tells us this was always going to be the case after such a bad financial crisis. It’s not His fault, you see.

For the racist side blaming the President’s policies, Walker mentions two other economic academics, but links only to a PDF file of the “Romney Plan” on the Romney campaign website. It’s written by the people he mentions, but this is obviously going to raise a red flag with readers. It’s a partisan campaign manifesto, so not to be taken as seriously as the view Walker offers from the other side. Even though he allows as how the other economics experts are sympathetic to the President, an independently researched and published book and opinion piece isn’t even remotely the same thing as an actual party platform. It’s rather disingenuous to present these as apples-to-apples.

I suppose it would be churlish to compare word counts here, like they did for the debates. This is just one more piece to support the BBC’s overall Narrative that there is no legitimate opposition to the President’s policies, and that those who express the desire to vote against Him are motivated by something else.

For a hint at Walker’s personal political views, see this old piece where he sanitizes the political views and writings of that well-known eugenics fan and Stalinist, Bernard Shaw.

THE LIVING WAGE AND MODERN MARXISM

The BBC has been to the fore in providing a platform to those such as the Milibands and Boris Johnson who advocate the neo-Marxist nonsense of “a living wage”. Boris was on Today this morning waffling about it and Miliband got plenty of coverage too. These Statists all line up bully business into buying out more so they can feel all good inside. Now then, my beef with the BBC on this is that it does not provide the same platform to those people who oppose this “Living Wage” oxymoron on the basis it will be the death of many UK businesses. From a Conservative point of view people may wonder at Johnson’s embrace of this example of latter day Marxism but then again, perhaps that is why the BBC tolerate Boris?

STATELESS

Notice the BBC are crusading for what THEY claim are “Stateless” children who come to the UK perfectly legally but then “fall through the cracks”. Gosh, they cannot even claim welfare or housing benefit. Strikes me that the BBC and those advocacy “charities” it links to in this article are playing a bit fast and loose with the facts here.I suggest that many of the alleged “Stateless” should not BE here in the first place and the BBC might do better to investigate how they got here and WHY they travel THOUSANDS of miles to reside in our country? Is the weather that so attracts them? Might they be just one more example of the Welfare Tourism that Labour bequeathed us?

START THE WEEK…

Anyone else out there catch Andrew Marr’s “Start the Week” this morning? It was an appalling left-wing fest featuring former Irish President and UNophile Supremo Mary Robinson and Michael Ignatieff. We had the usual BBC endorsed mix of climate change advocacy, a bit of US bashing, a generous soupcon of Israeli bashing (Well, with Mary Robinson in the house what else do you expect?) and, of course, “human rights” evangelising. Oh, and mustn’t forget Ignatieff telling us how MUCH we need the State Broadcaster!!! What amused me was Marr’s obvious admiration for quite contrary Mary as she – and “the Elders” (Gotta love that ) travel round the world spreading their gospel of human rights and climate change..first class of course ..in those BIG planes. Not even a hint of irony….