The Media’s Selective Rage: What Happens When Lady Justice Winks?

      The Media’s Selective Rage: What Happens When Lady                                                Justice Winks?

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 8/20/17

Here we go again.  Have we noticed the pattern?   Store window bashing in Ferguson, Baltimore, and other cities was attributed to “years of frustration over racism and bigotry.”  In other words, it was excusable. 

So was the blocking of traffic on major arteries and the vile mistreatment of cops across the country.  The “frustration” of black youths should be understood, we were told.

             The Black Lives Matter organization, though it chanted murderous things about cops, was also granted victimhood and invited to the Obama White House.  The Black Panthers, that aging group from the ‘60’s who stood just outside voting precincts to remind voters how they had better vote, went unpunished. 

            But in Charlottesville, Virginia the violence done by the KKK, the White Nationalists, and the neo-Nazis is tagged abhorrent by the liberal media, Democrats, and certain Republicans, none of whom were outraged by the violence of Black Lives Matter.

            Let’s call it what it is: selective rage.  As it turns out, Lady Justice is not blind after all.  In fact she often winks.  Media liberals wink at leftists when they commit violence.  They have strokes when so-called right wing groups commit theirs.  Why CNN, MSNBC, and all three of the old line networks can’t label it all inexcusable is beyond me.  Leftist violence on college campuses, for instance, draws a wink from the media.  It lays bare their bleeding hearts, revealing their long held belief that violence is ok when committed by minorities or precious college students. 

            The Charlottesville violence wasn’t committed by President Trump, yet the media blames  him.  Trump is faulted for not using the exact words of condemnation the media stars preferred.  A handful of Congressional Republicans, instead of defending themselves and their party’s duly elected president, rushed to the cameras to distance themselves from the KKK. 

Congressional Republicans should be angry that they are clumped with the KKK.  A good three quarters of them, however, are afraid of the media.  That fear explains the moral high horse they climb upon when falsely accused.

            Why aren’t Republicans quick to point toward former Democratic U.S. Senate icon Robert Byrd who was a wizard in the KKK?  Or to Arkansas Senator William Fulbright, Bill Clinton’s mentor and a staunch segregationist?  Or to Al Gore, Sr.?  Why not remind the nation who gave us Lincoln, abolition, and the Civil Rights Act?  It wasn’t Democrats.  They gave us abortion, same-sex marriage, transgender bathrooms, and Obamacare.

            Calling the KKK and the other vile groups at Charlottesville right wingers is an uninformed misnomer.  In no way are they philosophical conservatives.  Neo-Nazis aren’t right wingers.  The Nazis were socialists.  They promoted government takeover of practically every phase of people’s lives.  Adolf Hitler’s political philosophy lay nowhere near Jefferson or Reagan’s limited government views.  To be precise, we could call Hitler a Democrat as far as his view of the role of government is concerned.  No, not because of his evil! Because of his political philosophy, i.e., government, government, government, and centralized power.

            So the Caesar-like stabbing video of President Trump wasn’t violence.  I watched as CNN panelists said it wasn’t.  It was “art.”  Strange that Kathy Griffin’s bloody, detached head of the president got her fired from CNN, but the stabbing video of him was defended.

            The Charlottesville tragedy centered on the ISIS-style removal of Confederate statues.  To that, Condoleezza Rice, who knows prejudice, declared, “Sanitizing history makes you feel good, but it’s a bad thing.”  Black conservative Alan West added, “History is not there for us to love or hate, but to learn from.  A statue cannot oppress anyone.”

            As for hate, does anyone doubt that the stars of liberal media hate the president?  Their words for the President (a la Maxine Waters) are hypocritically hate-filled and disrespectful.  And we thought ABC’S Sam Donaldson hated Reagan and CBS’s Dan Rather hated Bush II!  

            For many Americans it’s painful to hear or use the word hate so frequently as I am doing here; however, our current national discourse requires it.  It would help if politicians and news people would give all hate equal footing and acknowledge that Lady Justice is blind-folded, that at Charlottesville it was hate versus hate.  On this, the president was right.

            It would also help if police would arrest more lawbreakers, no matter what side they are on.

            The media has moved from “not presidential” to “no moral authority,” as though they treasure truth themselves. Their own disdain for the president and their condescension for his unwashed 69 million supporters is blinding them.  Their rage is selective and always has been.

Roger Hines

8/16/17