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‘Chatsworth Farnsworth’
Strikes Again
Jack Kenny
Lew Rockwell.com
Saturday January 5, 2007
In her 2004 book Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk, stubbornly
irreverent New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd recalled in her
introduction that "Poppy" Bush, (Bush ’41) was
rather uncomfortable with Ms. Dowd in her role during the first
Bush administration as the Times’ White House correspondent.
"Poppy Bush had been expecting a traditional pin-striped
Times correspondent, one with a name like Chatsworth Farnsworth
III, who would scribble about ’41 leading the Atlantic alliance,"
Dowd observed. Not only the New York Times, but the whole media
establishment has too many aspiring Chatsworth Farnsworths, with
or without Roman numerals, who are all too eager to discover the
next world leader of grand ambition and global "vision."
We would be better served if they would just stand back and report
and comment on how the American people choose the president of
the United States. Where have you gone, Theodore H. White?
The Anything But Candid (ABC) television network and cable channel
Fox News this week announced plans to limit the number of candidates
participating in this weekend’s televised debates –
ABC’s on Saturday night and the Fox News event on Sunday
night. This is, for the benefit of that portion of the rest of
the civilized world that may not have been paying attention, the
weekend immediately preceding next Tuesday’s New Hampshire
primary elections. ABC had a number of criteria for winnowing
the field based on standing in the polls, money raised and how
they fared in the Iowa caucuses. Fox had already made its decision
for its Republican debate and U.S. Reps. Ron Paul of Texas and
Duncan Hunter of California didn’t make the cut.
(Article continues below)
That means the Fox debate will include the Big Three –
Romney, McCain, Giuliani – whom former candidate Tommy Thompson
called by one name: "Rudy McRomney." And Gov. Huckabee
will be both seen and heard by the national TV audience, unless
he has lost another 100 pounds by then and has become invisible.
And former Tennessee Senator and Law and Order star Fred Thomson
will be included and will no doubt lead a nationwide TV audience
to the dramatic discovery of the missing smoking gun, or "mushroom-shaped
cloud" that justified the war in Iraq.
Duncan Hunter won’t get to talk about his fence to keep
the illegal immigrants out. And without Ron Paul, there won’t
be single voice in the Republican debate raised against our continued
participation in the great neo-nuthouse Bush War II in Iraq that
Paul has always opposed, still opposes and would end soon after
he enters the White House. At that time, Fox News may fall on
its propagandistic sword and stop covering the White House, though
there may be occasional mention of rumors of an alleged White
House somewhere in Washington, DC. Perhaps there will even be
rumors of a Washington, D.C. Who needs a real president, White
House or capital, anyway? Who needs a real debate? Fox News creates
its own reality.
Indeed, that is what many, if not most, of the columnists, commentators
and alleged reporters in Chatsworth Nation wish to do. They like
to create our reality for us. They will tell us who the candidates
and what the issues are, thank you. A caller on a talk show here
in New Hampshire made the point that it was not so much an issue
of who gets left out of the debates, but what is being left out.
Neither Paul’s argument against the war in Iraq nor his
call for abolition of the Federal Reserve will be heard by the
Fox News audience. Nor will Dennis Kucinich’s plan for universal
health care be heard on ABC. The marketplace of ideas that should
be part of a presidential debate has been shrunk by the imperial
edict of the Chatsworth Caesars of the Fourth Estate.
Listening to that very insightful argument, I didn’t think
it had much impact on the two professors who were guests on the
program, one from the University of New Hampshire, the other from
Harvard. Both offered tepid defenses of the ABC’s and Fox’s
fiats. Neither, I suspect, gives a cat’s keyster or a rat’s
rear end about "the marketplace of ideas." Neither,
I am certain, do the two major political parties. And neither
does the "mainstream media" which is so much and so
often in bed with the political establishment that they are no
doubt breaking laws against incest and fornication in every state
in the union.
Is it a coincidence that the establishment, kennel-fed media
want to keep out pretty much the same people that the political
establishment wants to keep out – the Pauls and the Kuciniches
and the Hunters, the bulls in a political china shop, who aren’t
afraid of breaking a few political icons? That gives the "mainstream
media" or Nuthouse News, Inc., more time to dote on the stars
and amplify their messages for them. We hear, for example, that
voters in New Hampshire or Iowa, are being asked to compare Hillary
Clinton’s "experience" versus Barack Obama’s
promise of change. What we don’t hear much of is the substance,
or lack of it, in the change Obama promises. And we seldom hear
the journalistic gatekeepers of the political conversation challenge
Clinton’s claim of experience. The cartoonists do a better
job – especially the one who depicted Sen. Clinton in an
operating room advising a patient not to worry: "I’m
not a surgeon, but I was married to one for eight years."
I recently heard one of the talking heads on the radio refer
offhandedly to Sen. Clinton’s "sensible foreign policy."
Really? On what, I wonder, is that glib assumption based? Her
cop-out, pass the buck vote in October of 2002 to authorize the
Great Decider to unilaterally decide whether or not he would take
this nation to war in Iraq – when it was all too obvious
he would? Someone should have brought Senator Clinton and each
of her colleagues who voted as she did a bowl of water so each
could ritually wash his or her hands in the tradition of Pontius
Pilate.
That is what the "mudstream" media is inclined to call
a "sensible foreign policy." Go along to get along.
Follow the conventional wisdom, defined so well by Joe Sobran
as, "what everybody thinks everybody else thinks." People
like Paul or Kucinich, who opposed our war of aggression in Iraq
from the beginning and have consistently opposed the funding of
it, are usually labeled, "controversial" at best and
"extremist" and "isolationist" at worst.
Last year, PBS correspondent Bill Moyers produced a documentary
called Buying the War, showing how the major news media swallowed
the lies, half-truths and deceptions that somehow convinced most
of the nation (if the polls were to be believed) that Iraq was
a serious threat to the United States. Did the establishment media
"buy" the war? Or was the media "bought" by
the war’s proponents?
At the end of last week, Fergus Cullen, chairman of New Hampshire’s
Republican State Committee, was still trying to convince Fox News,
with whom the state GOP is co-sponsor of the debate, to relent
and let the banned candidates participate. My suggestion to Mr.
Cullen was that he announce the New Hampshire Republican Party
has withdrawn its sponsorship, leaving Fox to either go it alone
or find another sponsor. For the sake of candor, I recommend that
Fox sponsor this debate as a joint venture with the American Kennel
Club. That, or something like that, is where I would assume the
political establishment finds the accommodating Chatsworth Farnsworths
of the Fourth Estate.
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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