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Better fat than fascist

~ Considerations into the failures of over goverance & the successes of freedom

Monthly Archives: February 2015

Brian Williams Saga Should Not Surprise

10 Tuesday Feb 2015

Posted by BetterFatThanFascist.com in Brian Williams, CNN, Peter Arnett

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Brian Williams, CNN, Peter Arnett

By Greg Smith

Why is there any surprise that a television ‘journalist’ paid $10 million per year has problems with embellishing the facts?

Journalism is among if not the lowest-paid line of white-collar work there is. Ask any Joe Shlub print reporter how they feel about having to listen to teachers, who work less and are paid a lot more, complain about how much they make.

While higher education is pretty much a requirement to get hired, it doesn’t take a college degree to be a good journalist. More than anything it takes common sense, some tenacity and a willingness to work; work really hard. Any journalist I ever knew would have been pretty darn happy to make even $60,000 a year. To make half a million a year would be too good to be true. So how are network anchors so far above the rest of their field that Brian Williams makes $10 million annually? In itself that should be a red flag.

Brian Williams and other network anchors, strictly speaking, are not even journalists. They are actors paid to provide the right face, voice inflection, gravitas and likability to generate viewership. Their clothes, hair color, glasses or lack thereof and every other detail of their public persona are a calculation. An expensive suit their normal costume; on the road a Brooks Brother safari jacket lends just the right feel. For them reporting involves a set, be it at a New York City corporate high rise or a third-world, debris-filled side street cloaked in smoke and awash in distant gunfire.

Does anyone remember Peter Arnett, the Pulitzer-prize winner who became the face of CNN by reporting from a Bagdad hotel during the 1991 Gulf War? He, at least while the cameras were rolling, walked the walk and talked the talk of the consummate globe-trotting journalist who would brave anything to bring us the facts. In 1998 CNN ran a report which said U.S. forces had used chemical weapons, sarin gas, in 1970 while trying to kill Americans in Laos who had defected during the Vietnam War. Arnett reported the 18-minute story with all the convincing flair of a reporter.

Then fate pulled back the curtain on Arnett’s professional costume party. The story turned out to have a few important holes and as criticism mounted against the network, Arnett and producers involved, Arnett’s response was he was just the face of the story, not the journalist. He wasn’t accountable for errors or omissions.

“I’m a company guy,” said Arnett to the Washington Post describing his place in the brouhaha. “You want me to read a script, I’ll read it.”

So we have costumes, sets and a script. Shouldn’t be any surprise about the occasional foray into fiction.

To be fair to Brian Williams, I have “misremembered” things, and I know others have as well. Talk to someone with whom you shared an experience 10 years ago and see if you both remember the pertinent facts the same. Williams’s story about his helicopter taking fire is a little bigger deal and is more problematic. From the descriptions he didn’t misremember his own experience, he inserted himself into someone else’s.

Why Williams would consciously or unconsciously create a personal story should be obvious. His rather substantial livelihood and celebrity are based on a public perception. He is no worse than the aging actress on her third set of plastic surgeries or the has been climate-activist singer whose life and livelihood use 500 times more carbon-based energy than the rest of us, all in a bid to remain relevant.

The perplexing question is how did a guy who makes $10 million a year reading stories researched and written by others ever get a level of journalistic credibility in the first place? Considering his job could be done with a $100 piece of software, there should be no surprise that he has taken some license to keep himself relevant.

Greg Smith is a freelance writer and political consultant who lives in Bantam, CT. His blog is found at www.betterfatthanfascist.com

http://ajrarchive.org/Article.asp?id=%20838

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Jeb? No Thank You to Romney Sequel

09 Monday Feb 2015

Posted by BetterFatThanFascist.com in Common Core, Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney

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Common Core, Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney

By Greg Smith

One down, Jeb to go.

Thankfully, Mitt Romney has dropped any plans he had for a third run for the White House. Now, the GOP needs to tell another pillar of softer, gentler Republicanism he is not the right person for the presidency.

I like Jeb Bush in the same way I like Romney. Both seem like nice guys who have been willing to run for public office and take the requisite public lashings. Both seem genuine and intelligent, maybe people I’d want to go camping with. But both have a fatal flaw if viewed through the prism of the Republican presidential nomination.

The biggest chink in Jeb’s armor is his continued support of Common Core, the federal government’s latest attempt to graft higher standards onto the states’ public school systems. Common Core reminds me of something Will Rogers once said about another major social innovation that promised to use activist government to improve people’s lives: “Communism is like prohibition, it’s a good idea but it won’t work.”

Rogers could tell Communism couldn’t work because it was too complicated and contradicted basic human nature. The Red Menace was based on what sounded nice — what sounded nice quickly turned genocidal — rather than what is. We saw the same in No Child Left Behind, and Race to the Top, two bold education initiatives that after billions of dollars spent made as big a difference as a sno-cone dropped in Lake Michigan. Any positive effect they provided was tiny compared to their cost. Money from these types of programs could instead be used for something as simple and effective as limiting class size. America’s post-war history is littered with these types of projects that were too radical and invasive to improve the status quo for the long term, instead wasting precious resources in the short term.

In 2008, it became apparent early on the McCain-Palin ticket was adrift when Sarah Palin was explaining in an interview how a McCain administration planned to pay for some new programs by eliminating waste in current programs. What is wrong with controlling waste? The most basic notion behind American conservatism is the government is inherently wasteful and it cannot be controlled because every penny government spends is free money to someone. If government waste can be controlled, there is no reason for fiscal conservatism.

In that vein, any belief by Jeb Bush that Common Core can positively impact education in America says one of two things about him: Either he is willing to overlook a basic truism to appeal to more voters – I don’t believe this to be the case – or he lacks a basic understanding on the limits of government effectiveness.

If the GOP can’t finally find a nominee who both understands the limits on government capabilities and offer an effective platform within that sphere, it may be time to look for a Grand New Party.

Greg Smith is a freelance writer and political consultant who lives in Bantam, CT. His blog is found at http://www.betterfatthanfascist.com

https://betterfatthanfascist.com/2014/02/26/gw-bridge-scandal-endemic-of-government/

GOP & the Common Core

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