Reasonable MSM commentary?

Unbelievable as it may sound, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson used the word "reasonable" to describe people who believe Louis Farrakhan's crackpot theory that the levee breaks were deliberate acts of racism. The following is from Robinson's interview on yesterday's Meet the Press:

I was stunned in New Orleans at how many black New Orleanians would tell me with real conviction that somehow the levee breaks had been engineered in order to save the French Quarter and the Garden District at the expense of the Lower Ninth Ward, which is almost all black. You know, I don't for a minute think the Corps of Engineers or the city of New Orleans would be clever enough to do that at this point. But these are not wild-eyed people. These are reasonable, sober people who really believe that.
(Via the G. Gordon Liddy Show.) (Emphasis added.)

Sorry, but there is nothing reasonable about believing in something so patently, outrageously, unreasonable. What is unreasonable is Robinson's egregious and irresponsible misuse of the word "reasonable."

Notice also that Robinson doesn't say the government didn't engineer the levee breaks because it would have been an unspeakably monstrous crime; he merely says that they're "not clever enough" to have done it.

Huh?

Not clever enough?

Our government was not clever enough (at least, not "at this point".....) to have deliberately engineered the levee breaks which flooded the city? An atrocity so foul that had Stalin, Hitler, Mao, or the Khmer Rouge done it, they'd have justly been condemned as genocidal?

Gee. The stuff that passes for fairness in the mainstream media.

(I hope Robinson would at least allow that Jewish doctors "aren't clever enough" to inject black babies with AIDS.)

MORE: In another (emotional) "Meet the Press moment," Tim Russert sat by while a local Democratic politician named Aaron Broussard lied blatantly about the timing of a nursing home death.

Russert didn't challenge him, even when he made wild accusations of FEMA "cutting [his parish's] emergency [communication] lines" and ordering the Coast Guard not to give them badly needed fuel.
"Meet the Press" subsequently issued a retraction, claiming the story had been "an emotional moment." (Via Glenn Reynolds.)

Hmmm.....

I'm wondering whether "emotion" explains why Russert sat there watching his Washington Post colleague claim it was "reasonable" to think that government racists deliberately blew up the levees (even if he didn't think the latter were clever enough to pull it off.)

(Perhaps I should be glad he didn't second the emotion.)


UPDATE (09/29/05): According to this Newsmax report, Farrakhan's source for theory that the levees were deliberately blown up was none other than Mayor Nagin:

"We flew to Dallas, Texas - members of the Millions More Movement - where we met with Mayor Nagin . . . Mayor Nagin told us there was a 25-foot crater under the levee."

Farrakhan cautioned: "He didn't say there was a bomb. He just said there was a crater," then added: "I say they blew it [up]."

A full five days after Farrakhan cited Nagin as his source for news that not all the levee damage looked natural, Nagin himself has had nothing to say about the levee plot theory - a silence that some see as a tacit endorsement.

Two weeks ago Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson said that Farrakhan's theory was gaining currency in Nagin's city.

(Things are getting to the point where nothing is reasonable anymore....)

More Farrakhan nonsense here (if you like that sort of thing).

posted by Eric on 09.19.05 at 10:14 AM





TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://classicalvalues.com/cgi-bin/pings.cgi/2797






Comments

I beg to differ; people who believe crap like this are NOT "reasonable, sober people." They're delusional.

libertarianobserver   ·  September 19, 2005 12:39 PM

Reminds me of Stalin and the "Doctor's Plot". He accused Jewish doctors of plotting to kill him. Fortunately, he died before he could do what he was planning to do, i.e., start another purge or pogrom in which all Jews would be sent to Siberian death camps.

Libertarian Observer is right. The epistemology as well as the morals of today's culture are becoming increasingly corrupt. Conservatives such as the John Birch Society used to be ridiculed for having all kinds of crackpot conspiracy theories (most of which have turned out to be right), but today the Left launches such theories with no basis whatsoever and with no criticism whatever from the media, they are accepted as "reasonable" and "mainstream", merely an "alternative" point of view.

President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rice, Secretary Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, John Roberts, and all Republicans are routinely assumed to be behind every conceivable problem, including this hurricane. The theory that the Apollo 11 Moon landing was a hoax -- which used to be confined to the Flat Earth Society -- is now propagated all over the media, not in order to prove a flat Earth but in order to denigrate all greatness. "Post-modern de-constructionism" is used in our universities to prove that Shakespeare, Beethoven, etc., were evil Dead White European Males. Jews (many of whom gave their lives as Freedom Riders during the Civil Rights struggle of the early 1960s) are accused of killing Negro babies with AIDS, are said to have been behind slavery, and everything else Jew-haters can concoct. The Jews of Israel are damned for defending themselves and for merely existing. The Blood Libel, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, The International Jew, and Mein Kampf, and Holocaust denial circulate throught the Muslim East.

As Ellsworth Toohey said in The Fountainhead: "Never bother to examine a folly. Ask yourself only what it accomplishes." In her journals while writing The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand wrote of Toohey: "He pretends to be attacking Morgan and Rockefeller, but he is really attacking Beethoven and Shakespeare." Today, the mask is off and the egalitarians are openly attacking Shakespeare and Beethoven. Their goal is to destroy Western civilization and reduce us all to a base equality. Their motive is as Ayn Rand identified it: hatred of the good for being the good.

Steven MAtLwmmambe-

I so very much wish that you were wrong.

Fortunately, "they" are a minority -- but it's still scary witnessing the leaders of the opposition party in the most powerful nation the world has ever known espousing such a philosophy.

Clint   ·  September 19, 2005 09:45 PM


March 2007
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
        1 2 3
4 5 6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30 31

ANCIENT (AND MODERN)
WORLD-WIDE CALENDAR


Search the Site


E-mail




Classics To Go

Classical Values PDA Link



Archives




Recent Entries



Links



Site Credits