Media Matters (for America, they claim) has officially become a parody unto itself. What started as a wonderful (if not Orwellian) dream of a non-profit entity living off of the ample teat of George Soros busily crafting “rapid response” items in opposition to the small yet enormously effective voices from the right in journalism, has now turned into what appears to be a bunch of guys monitoring radio, TV and the internet with the hopes of finding the slightest divergence from left wing orthodoxy as dictated by their founder, spaceship enthusiast John Podesta.
It isn’t enough that they label as “homophobic” any questions about Safe School Czar Kevin Jenning’s objectively questionable judgment with regard to the teaching materials associated with his organization GLSEN. And it isn’t enough that they dismiss any video report exposing left-wing sacred cows such as ACORN and Planned Parenthood as “heavily edited” as if editing automatically renders a report untruthful (even though the entire, unedited transcripts and audio for the ACORN stories have been available at Big Government). No, those ridiculously laughable positions that fly in the face of common sense are not enough to keep the team at MM(FA) feeling smugly supercilious and self-important… now they go on the attack if a journalist dares to refer to Guantanamo prisoners as “terrorists,” No, this is not a parody.
Yesterday, the offending item was in that bastion of the right-wing fever swamp, the New York Times. They made the glaring mistake of showing their obvious conservative bias with the following outrageous headline: “Many Ex-Detainees Return To Terror, Pentagon Says.” I will pause and allow the ooze of the Richard Mellon Scaife slime to drip from every pore of your body from your brief exposure to this fascist propaganda. Disgusting, isn’t it?
Thankfully we have a bunch of guys at MM(FA) who are on the case thanks to some generous over-funding from Soros, convicted of insider trading in France and a soon-to-be recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom (that’s just an educated guess, I don’t have a second, independent source on the medal rumor).
The print headline of a January 7 New York Times article reads “Many Ex-Detainees Return To Terror, Pentagon Says” [emphasis added] — a claim not supported by the article itself, which does not assert that the detainees in question had previously engaged in terrorist acts but only that a Pentagon report finds that “about one in five” of former Guantánamo detainees that have been released subsequently “has engaged in, or is suspected of engaging in, terrorism or militant activity.”
You see, my fellow racists, a Gitmo prisoner who is released and commits an act of terror is not returning to terrorism. Unless you can show specific evidence of an act of terror he committed to land him at Gitmo, we must assume that Bush/Cheney/Halliburton plucked the poor fellow from his job at the Islamabad Dairy Queen and held him at Gitmo just to satisfy their bloodthirsty need to torture innocents. Why else would “terrorists” be at Gitmo? You certainly can’t jump to the conclusion that they are “terrorists” just because they were rounded up on the battlefields of Afghanistan during the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the months after 9/11. How dare Pinch Sulzberger?
As if our own common sense and wisdom are not enough to swat this insipid little group away with the back of our hand like the gnat that it is… we actually had an assist in showing them to be the fools that they are from none other than President Barack Obama. In his address to the nation yesterday focusing on the security breakdowns on Flight 253 on Christmas Day, the President said:
This afternoon, my Counterterrorism and Homeland Security Advisor, John Brennan, will discuss his review into our terrorist watch list system — how our government failed to connect the dots in a way that would have prevented a known terrorist from boarding a plane for America, and the steps we’re going to take to prevent that from happening again.
Whoa! Hold on there Mr. President. You can’t go around calling this poor suspect a “known terrorist”! Oh sure, he is a terrorist NOW, but only after he tried to blow up the plane. But, how can you refer to him as a “known terrorist” in the context of his boarding the plane? How could he have been a “known terrorist” before Flight 253? Did he commit any act of terror? Isn’t his status exactly the same as those poor, unfortunate souls locked up at Gitmo right now?
Of course it’s fun to make fun of MM(FA). (Earlier this week Greg Gutfeld did as good a job as anyone can do in that worthy endeavor.) But if these nebbishes have any kind of impact on the knee-jerk, politically correct pantywaists who populate the newsroom of the Times (and countless other papers across the land) then it will be hard to find any humor in this kind of investment in censorship futures.
By going out of their way to dumb down the definition of terrorism and attempting to shame journalists into thinking twice before using the label (lest they receive the same kind of treatment Glenn Beck might deserve) they are contributing to the overall somnambulism that seemed to affect the Administration right up until yesterday when the President finally felt comfortable declaring to the world: “We are at war.”
Yes, we are. It is great to hear you acknowledge it so unambiguously, Mr. President. I hope your friends (and make no mistake, they are your very dear friends) at Media Matters come to grips with that reality, too, and stop trying to intimidate our nation’s free press into fitting their politically correct model of “Good Journalism” where a Gitmo prisoner who commits an act of terror after his release can’t be described as “returning” to terror. If MM(FA) can’t bring themselves to allowing such an egregious lapse of journalistic ethics as the New York Times committed in this case, then at least I hope they let the story die and go back to doing what they do best: defending pedophilia.