The Fourth Estate has become a Fifth Column, whose world-wide reach fosters traitors, not only to nations, but to Earthkind. Their constellation by which they navigate is The Golden Calf, its Polaris is Bill Clinton, who convinced the thralls of media that a false god is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, and that bullshit is better than no shit at all. After all, it works in Hollywood.
Journalism is the Fourth Estate, which in our system is as low as an estate can get. When you consider the people who ply that trade, it couldn’t have happened by accident. One considers it is not the journalist but the hapless viewer/reader who needs an editor to filter out the duplicity that grinds information into a kind of liberal news-meal.
The media sees its conceits, not as duplicity, but as romance. Never called to account, the mediacrats seem to retain their tenancy forever. Hooked on the hallucinogen of journalistic immortality, they never expect that they will one day go to that big op-ed room in the sky. Network anchormen are the most relentlessly tenured members of the Job Security or Bust Gang. Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Dan Rather have had their faces pasted on television screens so long people think they are decals.
Dan Rather’s demeanor is as congenial as watching a process server foreclose a mortgage on an orphanage. His word is as reliable as the ballpoint pen at a bank teller’s window. He is showing the strain of trying to appear plausible – and the greater strain of trying to appear personable. Rather’s position is that the media should not take sides in the War on Terror, and, to function objectively, must not be patriotic, although no one has ever accused him being that. His public pronouncements on the war in Iraq hammock between incoherent and defeatist. During an interview, Dan told Bill O’Reilly he thought Clinton was an honest man, and O’Reilly almost fell off his perch. It is expected Rather will reaffirm his belief in objectivity in a speech dedicating a new Pravda Wing of the National Press Club. If Dan Rather is ever remembered in journalism it will be because Edward R. Murrow said of him, “Beat it, kid.”
Peter Jennings is a Canadian by birth, and a resident of America by intrusion. He has been away from Canada so long, when someone gave him a hockey puck, he was up all night trying to get it open. Jennings went the Madison Avenue sincere necktie people one better by wearing suits with discreet lapels. By meticulous attention to his attire, it appears he has achieved the desired effect of insincerity, superficiality, and monotony. ABC’s last contractual offer to Peter Jennings (in a highly publicized negotiation) ended with ABC making him an offer that was insulting – but, apparently, not insulting enough.
Tom Brokaw still maintains the guilelessness of a geriatric schoolboy. Despite having written a book about “the greatest generation”, he talks as though he never read it. Brokaw is considered the most trustworthy network anchorman, principally because he is not Peter Jennings or Dan Rather.
Consider these ubiquitous journalistic aphids.
Nothing could be done to redeem Geraldo Rivera after his declaration that he finds Bill Clinton embraceable. I doubt if Bubba would spring for a motel room and just settle for a hug, even from a celebrity like Rivera. Geraldo is the first journalist ever requested by “the management” of a battlefield to leave the premises.
The Larry King Show is a Betty Ford Clinic for celebrities in recovery from their last Bill O’Reilly interview. King is the ideal hood ornament for CNN, which is a virtual informational Emporium of Empty.
Consider the titmouse twittering of the unremitting Barbara Walters who sounds like she is talking with her lips inserted through a keyhole. There should be a bounty on Ms. Barbara for her affected pronunciation of her show’s title as “Twinty Twinty”.
Bill Moyers dispenses a kind of propaganda-lite, a kind of hopelessly vanilla, suffocating, and classroom-dull journalism. He is a semi-subtle liberal dogmatist for the publicly funded left-of-left socialist PBS (Public Brainwashing System). One suspects his mother combs his hair before taking him across the street to the studio.
Charlie Rose, a Moyers disciple from that same socialist stable, is a show biz hobnobber and rubber of in-crowd elitist elbows, and fluent in the shallow patois of Spago-speak.
Thomas Friedman’s New York Times pontifical patter attempts to camouflage a shopkeeper’s eye-view of the world.
Journalists have the loyalty of water. They take the form of whatever receptacle they’re put in. A template in point is David Gergen. Unencumbered by political convictions, he takes on the coloration of his political surroundings, a commentator who ricochets from one administration to another. It is said, in the name Warren G. Harding, G stands for Gergen. By going to work for President Clinton, Gergen fulfilled his karma that he would never amount to anything. That Gergen has coiled his way into the faculty at Harvard’s Kennedy School is an abuse of inevitability.
Peter Arnett’s capers in Baghdad reveal him as a sheep in renegade’s clothing. Worse than his defecting to the Arab media, is his offense of looking like a villain out of Charles Dickens.
The depressing threnodies of professional CNN news mourner, Judy Woodruff, speak for themselves. She is always fastidiously, however mournfully, attired. It may be said on her behalf, she didn’t let herself go after she died – in a manner of speaking.
NPR’s snappish, housewifey NPR news hen, Mara Liaison’s, comments have an in woven gossipy over-the-back fence triviality.
Juan Williams – hip hop doomsayer who perceives the world as a conspiracy in restraint of rock n roll. He has a remarkable facility for switching any subject, however incongruously, such as the weather – to racism. In his hands civil rights have become swivel rights.
Helen Thomas, Gruppenfraulein of the White House Press Corps, has trouble gaining admission to the White House because the security people can’t tell whether that thing on her identification card is her photo or her thumbprint. She should be in a jar on a shelf in Harvard denaturing the formaldehyde in which she bobs.
Eleanor Clift has left America with no other exigency than to summon the redoubtable dispatcher of vampires, Professor Van Helsing, to end her tormenting of television viewers by driving a wooden stake through her tongue.
Liberal L.A. Times hack, Robert Scheer’s, columns have to be put through a leaching pit lest they infect. Reading his essays is like drinking out of the Ganges River after The Untouchables have taken their Saturday night soak. Scheer’s columns appear in a racially-biased Los Angeles broadsheet that has an inner city edition that offers affirmative action crossword puzzles with 20% of the definitions already filled in.
Tim Russert remains the relentlessly wide-eyed, slack-jawed, purveyor of parochial school locker room camaraderie.
No one in the media seems to be sympathetic to America’s mission in Iraq. A representative composite of these abovementioned captious critics of the war would be filing his reports from a coffee house which should he headlined as “The Battle of Starbucks.” To legitimize his military credentials, he might mount on his office wall his ancestral warrior crest – crossed pussy willow rods rampant over a field of cappuccino. He might also jazz up his text now and then with an occasional battlefield sighting of Elvis.
These journalistic savants’ commentaries continue to accumulate into stagnant pools of culture gunk, as depressing weather reports predict, “with no relief in sight.”
THE GRACELESS GRAYING OF WALTER CRONKITE
Yogi Berra said “It ain’t over ’til it’s over.” Walter Cronkite’s re-intrusion into America’s consciousness proves it is over long before it’s over.
Cronkite rues his retirement, believing he stepped away too soon, and into something too redolent. One is staggered by his sudden assertion of support for the treasonous, corrupt and perverted Bill Clinton, which can only render his own respectability a knee in the groin. He recently droned in tones sepulchral, “American people are going to have to realize that perhaps they are going to have to yield sovereignty to an international body to enforce world law.” Journalists are by nature liberals, and liberals are by compulsion, propagandists. That inclination reasserted itself with a vengeance in the case of Walter Cronkite at an inappropriately advanced age. It will be remembered, Cronkite was the first major media figure to declare the war in Viet Nam “un-winnable.” Along with throwing in the towel, he threw in a pair of pantyhose autographed by Jane Fonda, and countersigned by Ho Chi Minh and Typhoid Mary. What a trifecta!
Mediacrats are still of the opinion that the War in Viet Nam was cancelled due to the loss of Walter Cronkite’s interest. Presumably, Walter wishes now to re-distinguish himself by doing the same with the War on Terror. Apparently some of our leaflets demanding surrender that our Air Force dropped in Iraq blew into the Walter’s window. Cronkite may yet show up on CNN, a network that has a predilection for leftovers, perhaps to be billed as The Voice of Capitulation.
To start promoting a political agenda in your eighties is like finding out on your wedding night that you’re never too old to be too old. At his age it is practical not to buy any extended-play records. (We have no clue as to Cronkite’s exact age, except that he recently referred to Robert Byrd as a brat.)
Cronkite was for years the intravenous bag that dripped a daily informational anesthetic into the habituated mind. For the thralls that labor in the vineyards of journalism, Walter Cronkite is still the anchorman’s anchorman, the Pope Emeritus of Media – the John Paul II of Small Screen. Cronkite has taken the bait of his own legend, an icon-at-large, whose current opinions he hands down on stone tablets from Mount Sinai. He is the Moses of Madison Avenue, the Cecil B. DeMille of Pomposity Pictures, the Big Bird of the National Press Muppets, and The Grinch That Stole 6 O’clock.
While at CBS, Cronkite was a depot of platitudes beyond exhausting. He never said anything worthy of plagiarizing. Decades slipped by without his offering an opinion. (One supposes nothing came to mind.) In order for any opinion of his to stand up today, it has to be leaned against a wall. Certainly, there is no expression that could be called “a Cronkite-ism.” However, he was wont to conclude every broadcast saying, “And that’s the way it is.” Occasionally a dedicated adherent will give him an ego massage by asking him if he made that up all by himself.
Cronkite had to be put in a decompression chamber lest his removal from the studio ambience trigger a case of the bends. While the Captain may go down with the ship, the aging anchorman does not necessarily go down with the flap on his long johns.
Due to the magic of television, Cronkite became the electronic relative who comes to visit and never goes home. Cronkite is America’s uncle-at-large and a relentless, however irrational, affection for him endures to this day.
It did not matter to the CBS biggies if you turned Walter off – as long as the Nielson families did not. Television is like that. The simpleminded and the lonely anointed him as America’s relation, a notion that became the metaphorical love child of the sympathetic, the empathetic, the apathetic, and the plain pathetic. Cronkite may well be conjuring with the idea of his immortality in contemplation of the establishment of a new journalistic theology with himself as its central icon called Avuncularism and musing on how confirming it would be to hear people address their prayers to him as “Our Uncle Who Art in Heaven.”
Cronkite’s nightly text had been an olio of kapok, mustiness, and data lint. The initials CBS were coming to stand for Comatose Broadcasting System. Cronkite was finally phased out when the Nielsen Ratings suggested to the network “biggies” that his telecast had soporific side effects and the Evening News had become an on-air slumber party.
[Note: Cronkite’s restful personality seems to work even on himself. We are reminded that after Jesus raised him from the dead the first thing Lazarus did was take a nap.]
Cronkite circulates in Martha’s Vineyard among the rich and boaty where he has acquired a reputation as “The Maven of the Marina.” Because of his nautical perspicacity, he is doing research that will determine definitively which of the world’s oceans is the wettest. It may just be that he bought a boat just because he longed to see something in water other than his teeth. (He sometimes wears his yachting cap with the peak facing backwards as a gesture of his solidarity with downtrodden minorities and up trodden Democrats. Cronkite would have been laughed off the air had he showed up on camera wearing his orthopedic yachting cap.) The Coast Guard patrolling that area is accustomed to responding to panicky distress signals from ancient mariners like Cronkite who have wet their pants and are convinced the boat is taking water.
His celebrity endures, and when he dines out at posh restaurants the Head Chef will come to his table and personally mash his banana for him. It’s reported, as a courtesy to Walter’s pacifist inclination, sea food restaurants at the marina adorn their customers with lobster bibs bearing pictures of hapless crustaceans dropping AK47s and surrendering to the shellcracker.
Cronkite’s ego requires he associate with persons of influence. He knows Bill Clinton is positioning himself to become the next Secretary General of the UN (as reported in the Arkansas newspaper of record, The Ozark Unstrung Banjo-Tribune.) We have seen the pictures of Bill and Hillary cruising on Cronkite’s yacht whose presence aboard made it sorely in need of scuttling. It is said the Clintons belong to the upscale Martha’s Vineyard Traitors and Perverts Club. Cronkite wallows in his camaraderie with Bill Clinton, a chronic case of arrested morality and a man who in only eight years took America to a level of decadence it took Europe a thousand years to acquire. Of course Bubba had the counsel, if not the love of Hillary Clinton, who is herself caught in the revolving door of ethical menopause.
Sooner or later, as was bound to happen, Uncle Walter has become that eccentric family member who must be locked in his room until after the company has gone home, lest he appear at the dinner table to describe his most recent descending colon evacuation for the edification of the guests.
The conventional wisdom is, for sentimental reasons, the CBS security guards still let him wander through the corridors of the studio in his flannel bathrobe and orthopedic yachting cap pretending to be The Ghost of Picture Tube Past. (Susceptible to chills at his advanced age Walter wears a bathrobe over his bathrobe.)
WALTER AND JIMMY
Uncle Walter’s other self-aggrandizing chumminess is with Jimmy Carter, who he said is the smartest President he ever met, with more brains in his little finger than he has in his entire prostate. Both Jimmy and Walter are along in years, although it is generally conceded, in the race to senility, Carter got the checkered flag. Carter’s recognition by the biased Nobel Prize Committee gave senility a bad name. There is some irony in the so-called world’s most prestigious award going to a guy who spends most of his time in his room arranging his sock drawer, re-hanging his enema bag, editing seed catalogues, and standing in front of the urinal waiting for his stream to kick in.
Uncle Walter and Jimmy have much in common. Walter knows Carter never saw a capitulation he could not endorse. Moreover, it’s good to have a confederate to scheme with in how to install a corrupt Arkansas yokel as the savior of Marxism, which, despite being defunct, both of them deem the only ism worth saving.
Ever the internationalist, Carter went to Cuba to help Castro hang pictures in his cabana of the Ceaucescus doing sex stuff. Jimmy told Fidel, “Havana is my kind of town.” The last person to express that sentiment was that other mental giant, Fredo Corleone.
Despite the incestuous trysting between Democrats and the journalists mentioned above, the Democrats continue to lament that they are having difficulty getting out their message. The media is not finding as easy a transfer of its prurient affections from the traitor-pervert Bill Clinton to the sinister and corrupt socialist polyp Tom Daschle. A warthog would have the same problem and write it off as aesthetic. The fact is Democrats will have no difficulty in getting their message out, because the media regards treason and perversion as good copy.
And while the subject of perversion abides, both the French and the Iraqis measure Americans by what they read in the New York Times, hence both of them mis-measured the length of America’s fuse. Unhappily for them, reading the New York Times is like reading the New York Times.