In an astonishing appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” today, Senator John Kerry (D-MA) declared freedom of speech and unbiased news coverage to be among the great enemies of the glorious State. Video courtesy of The Blaze:
If you can’t stomach the whole thing, I sympathize. Making sense of two solid minutes of Kerry babble is agonizing. Here’s the part everyone is quoting today:
And I have to tell you, I say this to you politely. The media in America has a bigger responsibility than it’s exercising today. The media has got to begin to not give equal time or equal balance to an absolutely absurd notion just because somebody asserts it or simply because somebody says something which everybody knows is not factual.
It doesn’t deserve the same credit as a legitimate idea about what you do. And the problem is everything is put into this tit-for-tat equal battle and America is losing any sense of what’s real, of who’s accountable, of who is not accountable, of who’s real, who isn’t, who’s serious, who isn’t?
In other words, he thinks its time for the media to start ignoring the Tea Party. Savor the pure, incomprehensible lunacy of his opening, too:
I mean, we literally, I mean, everybody’s talked about it, yes. The Congress was taken hostage, the country, the economy was taken hostage. You had people there who were literally ready to cut the baby in half. I mean, I’ve heard a lot of criticism of the President, and frankly, the President had no choice here. Congress had no choice here. We did the same thing the President had to do, which is save America from default.
Because a default would have been far more disastrous. And what we had were a group of people who were completely unaware, or didn’t understand, the consequences of their actions, who were actually arguing for a default.
Who was “literally” threatening to cut a baby in half? For that matter, who was figuratively threatening to do that? He’s referring to the Judgment of Solomon from the Book of Kings, in which two women were claiming parentage of the same baby, and Solomon announced the only way to settle the affair was to split the baby in two with a sword, so that each woman could get half. This prompted the true mother of the child to renounce her claim, for the sake of the baby, while the false mother was cool with Solomon’s gruesome suggestion for a compromise. The true mother got the baby.
Solomon was not, in fact, seriously planning to chop the kid up. He knew the true mother would reveal herself by sacrificing her claim in the name of love. Where does John Kerry think his miserable Party fits into that little analogy?
Who were the people arguing in favor of default? Refusing to raise the debt ceiling is not the same thing. Those who thought the debt ceiling should remain in place did not also want America to default on its financial obligations. On the contrary, they missed no opportunity to emphasize that those obligations must be paid. It was the Democrats who wanted to twist the 14th Amendment into a justification for limitless deficit spending by Presidential fiat, rather than a requirement that the President honor America’s sovereign debt.
Kerry is an intellectual featherweight who does little but clumsily parrot the things he hears other people say at Party meetings, so leave aside the verbal diarrhea at the beginning of the clip, and consider his main argument about the media’s obligation to heavily bias its coverage against whatever the aristocracy decides is “absurd” or “unserious.”
He didn’t go into details about how this would work. He can’t be proposing the media make these judgments independently, because obviously Fox News would not employ the same standards of absurdity as MSNBC. That’s exactly what he’s complaining about.
I assume Kerry has some sort of government bureau in mind - let’s call it the “Ministry of Truth” - that would instruct the media on what it’s allowed to cover, and who it’s allowed to quote. If the Ministry of Truth used any sort of objective criteria to decide what must be ignored, the Democrat Party would be in very deep trouble.
Just for starters, we’d hear the last of the MediScare talking points Democrats are so fond of. Nobody wants to take your Medicare away more than Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. They’re the ones who insist on riding the insolvent system into ruin. You can prove it with a calculator. Rep. Paul Ryan can do it on a cocktail napkin. The entire Democrat platform on Medicare non-reform is objectively, demonstrably absurd.
Think of all the times President Obama claims to have “always said” something he never said before. A quick Google search would cause the Ministry of Truth to launch into action, switching television coverage of the latest hollow Obama speech over to previously taped episodes of Wipeout, where at least it’s fun to watch someone who is all wet.
We’d also hear the last of anyone from either party talking about “spending cuts” in a bill like the Budget Control Act of 2011. None of its reductions in growth rate are actually “cuts” in anything. Every microphone would go dead the instant a politician chirped about “spending cuts” and activated its government-approved electronic anti-absurdity kill switch.
It seems to me that if media coverage were biased away from those who spout logically, mathematically certified nonsense, the unruly peasants John Kerry wants to silence would be the ones who ended up with most of the camera time. For that matter, we wouldn’t have made it twenty seconds into Kerry’s appearance on MSNBC this morning.
Remember, the Democrat Party advanced this buffoon as a candidate for the Presidency, and John Edwards was his running mate. The Party has not suffered nearly enough for that yet.
