James Watson and the Gal That Got Away: A Nobel Prize Back Story

By Nicholas Stix
Updated at 2 a.m., Monday, January 28, 2008.
Updated at 4:30 a.m., Tuesday, January 29, 2008.

Last October saw the birth of a noun, “Watsoning,” following the media show trial that destroyed the career of America’s most respected scientist, geneticist James Watson. Watson’s “crime” was in telling the truth in a British newspaper interview about what science knows about the links between race and intelligence. Watson was going to go down in flames, in any event, but had he stuck by his guns, he at least could have been a tragic hero. Instead, as in the old Soviet show trials, he confessed to a non-existent crime, and recanted. Watson’s phony “confession” brought him no more compassion from his tormentors than had those of Stalin’s victims. An acute observer sees in Watson’s capitulation yet another expression of the same lack of character and intellectual integrity that he has shown repeatedly in his career.


This afternoon my friend, the writer Michael D. Shaw, sent me his article, “Double Helix Double Cross.” It’s about the British scientist Rosalind Franklin, without whom James Watson, Francis Crick (1916-2004), and Maurice Wilkins (also 1916-2004!) would never have shared the Nobel Prize for discovering DNA’s double helix structure.

Although trained as a chemist, in her DNA research, Franklin was also just as much a physicist and a biologist. Indeed, the lab in which she, Crick, Wilkins and Watson were then working was devoted to “biophysics research.”

Prior to the media show trial last October that left the 79-year-old Watson disgraced, he had been considered America’s greatest living scientist. The firestorm had followed an interview that Watson, who was visiting England to promote his new book, had given to an old student of his who was working for a British newspaper, in the course of which he had told the truth about scientific knowledge of race and intelligence. However, when the heat came, rather than stand up for science, and be an example to honest researchers everywhere, Watson melted like an ice cream cone on a summer’s day.

While Watson had previously gotten in trouble for being a loose cannon, he had never been accused of having an excess of scientific scruples.

Shaw emphasizes that Watson has long sought to diminish Franklin’s true contributions to the DNA discoveries. He writes,

The scientist in question is the late Dr. Rosalind Franklin, a brilliant researcher who had produced the beautiful x-ray diffraction photos that put Watson on the right track as to DNA’s structure. Before seeing these photos, especially the famous photograph number 51, he and Crick, utilizing Linus Pauling’s hypothesis, were headed to nowheresville as to the molecular structure. That Franklin was unaware that her photos were shown to Watson surely adds to the controversy.

What makes it even worse is that Franklin was to die of ovarian cancer in 1958, at age 37, and was thus permanently knocked out of Nobel consideration. As you will see, this whole matter provides an interesting look at big-time science, and the small-time people involved….

As for Watson, he still arrogantly maintains that Franklin could take great pictures, but was not able to interpret her own data. For him to posit such a preposterous notion at this late date can only make me believe that he would have been lost without her pictures. Watson is protesting a bit too much….

Perhaps the saddest part of Franklin’s story is that she took one for the team. There is little doubt that her cancer was caused by overexposure to radiation during her career of x-ray crystallography. Like Marie Curie before her, radiation did her in. Of course, the only difference is that Curie received two Nobels (in 1903 and 1911) along with plenty of other honors, and lived to see her 66th birthday, while Rosalind Franklin died young and will forever be a footnote.

It’s a powerful article, written with a brevity I can only envy, and contains a gem of a portrait of the eccentric Franklin and the perverse social world of often egotistical and unscrupulous scientists that she and the future Nobel Laureates inhabited.

In another article on Franklin, David Ardell writes,

In James Watson’s account of the discovery of the structure of DNA, entitled The Double Helix, Rosalind Franklin was depicted inaccurately as an underling of Maurice Wilkins at King’s College. In fact, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin were peers. Franklin had discovered that DNA could crystallize into two different forms, an A form and a B form. John Randall gave Franklin the A form and Wilkins the B form, assigning them each the task of elucidating their molecular structure….

After discovering the existence of the A and B forms of DNA, Rosalind Franklin also succeeded in developing an ingenious and laborious method to separate the two forms, providing the first DNA crystals pure enough to yield interpretable diffraction patterns. She then went on to obtain excellent X-ray diffraction patterns of crystalline B-form DNA and, using a combination of crystallographic theory and chemical reasoning, discovered important basic facts about its structure. She discovered that the sugar-phosphate backbone of DNA lies on the outside of the molecule, not the inside as was previously thought. She discovered the helical structure of DNA has two strands, not three as proposed in competing theories. She gave quantitative details about the shape and size of the double helix. The all-important missing piece of the puzzle, that she could not discover from her data, was how the bases paired on the inside of the helix, and thus the secret of heredity itself. That discovery remained for Watson and Crick to make.

After Randall presented Franklin’s data and unpublished conclusions at a routine seminar, aspects of her results were informally communicated to Watson and Crick by Maurice Wilkins and Max Perutz, without her or John Randall’s knowledge. It was Watson and Crick who put all the pieces of the puzzle together from a variety of sources including Franklin’s results, to build their ultimately correct and complete description of DNA’s structure. Their model for the structure of DNA appeared in the journal Nature in April, 1953, alongside Franklin’s own report.

Thus was Franklin’s contribution at least equal to, if not superior to that of Wilkins. Had she lived until 1962, there would have been quite a row, considering that the Nobel rules are such that only “Up to three candidates may be listed per entry.” For some, Franklin’s proved to be a most timely death.

Mike Shaw believes that the same lack of character that led James Watson to deny credit to a world-class scientist after her death led him to back down in the face of a vicious, organized attack on science and recant his beliefs, which happened to be true, in favor of anti-scientific, politically correct lies about race and intelligence.

In a meditation on the song “The Man That Got Away,” which Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin wrote for Judy Garland in the 1954 movie classic, A Star is Born, disc jockey Jonathan Schwartz argued that the story behind Gershwin’s lyrics was his grief for his brother and musical collaborator, George. George Gershwin (1898-1937), who died at the age of 38 of a brain tumor, was the greatest musical talent America has so far produced. For Ira Gershwin, says Schwartz, George Gershwin was the man that got away.

In the history of the Nobel Prize, Roz Franklin was the gal that got away.

* * *

David Baxter just wrote me that he is producing a movie in London based on Franklin’s life, with Feel Films, with the working title, The Broken Code. The picture is to be directed by Peter Bogdanovich “before the end of the year.” The story will be from Baxter’s Alfred P. Sloan Award-winning screenplay, which “is being polished by Charles Wood” (Iris). Baxter adds, “My writing mentor was Anne Sayre, the woman who wrote the first biography on Rosalind (Rosalind Franklin & DNA) and who was her close friend. Anne died of scleroderma in 1988 and it took me some time to decide to continue writing the script because she was a major character in the story and was one of the only people who went out on a limb and questioned Watson's depiction of Rosalind in The Double Helix.”

Democrats’ Chickens Come Home to Roost:

Hillary Clinton’s Race Problems
By Nicholas Stix

For her entire adult life, Hillary Clinton has promoted anti-white racism. Unfortunately for her, black voters have recently discovered that Clinton is herself white.


Black Fairy Tale, White Nightmare?

Bill Clinton on Monday accused Barack Obama of fudging his early position on the Iraq war, and then said, “This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen.” The comment provoked criticism from black leaders and Obama supporters.

[Quoted passage added by AOL to Black Leaders Question Clinton Remarks, New York Times, Jan 12, 2008.]

New York Times reporters Carl Hulse and Patrick Healy led their January 12 story,

The Clinton campaign moved Friday to try to quell a potentially damaging reaction to recent comments by Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton that have drawn criticism from African-Americans just as the presidential primary campaign reached Southern states with significant numbers of black voters.

In a call on Friday to Al Sharpton’s nationally syndicated talk radio show, Mr. Clinton said that his “fairy tale” comment on Monday about Senator Barack Obama’s position on the Iraq war was being misconstrued, and that he was talking only about the war, not about Mr. Obama’s overarching message or his drive to be the first black president.

“There’s nothing fairy tale about his campaign,” Mr. Clinton said. “It’s real, strong, and he might win.”

But of course the impeached former president was fudging, since the truth is unspeakable, to wit, that Barack Obama’s entire campaign is an affirmative action fairy tale.

The Clintons have also caught heat from blacks over Hillary’s statement that, as the AP phrases it, Martin Luther King’s “dream of racial equality was realized only when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” That’s true, of course, but blasphemous, due to its suggestion that all racial good things have not flowed directly from the will of St. Martin.

AP’s Beth Fouhy, et al.:

Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton suggested Sunday that Barack Obama's campaign had injected racial tension into the presidential contest, saying he had distorted for political gain her comments about Martin Luther King's role in the civil rights movement.

In the run-up to today’s South Carolina Democratic primary, in which 50 percent of voters are expected to be black, both Clintons spent much of the last two weeks in intensive damage control, with Bill calling in to black radio talk shows, and Hillary appearing on Meet the Press, hosted by Tim Russert, longtime chief of staff to the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Hillary Clinton’s immediate senatorial predecessor.

Beth Fouhy, et al.:

“This is an unfortunate story line the Obama campaign has pushed very successfully,” the former first lady said in a spirited appearance on NBC's “Meet the Press.” “I don't think this campaign is about gender, and I sure hope it's not about race.”

But of course the campaign is about “gender” (sex) and race. What else could it possibly be about?

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are both leftwing Democrats. They both rabidly support affirmative action (AA) and multiculturalism (MC), which form the entire foundation of Obama’s political career. And what of Hillary, you ask? Hillary Clinton’s political career is based entirely on having married a privileged white male.

Affirmative action was originally the 1960s’ federal policy of racially discriminating against qualified whites and white-owned firms that were competing for certain scarce goods (jobs, admissions to selective universities, and contracts let by public agencies), and instead giving said scarce goods to unqualified blacks and unqualified black-owned firms.


The Consequences of Bad Intentions

AA was later illegally and unconstitutionally extended to the private sphere, and even to the political realm: Just as the 1964 U.S. Civil Rights Act was reinterpreted by Justice Department officials and the federal courts to mean not simply guaranteeing equal opportunity (non-discrimination against blacks) but, turning the Act’s explicit wording upside down, to entail engaging in egregious racial discrimination against whites, the 1965 Voting Rights Act was reinterpreted by the same parties such that rather than guaranteeing blacks the franchise, it guaranteed them rigged elections.

As Arch Puddington persuasively argued in Commentary, circa 1990, multiculturalism, or what I call hate studies (black studies, women’s studies, gay studies, Hispanic studies, etc.) exists to rationalize affirmative action.

I’ll see Puddington, and raise him. MC was developed by Marxists to destroy liberal democracy, the market economy, and the rule of law, and replace them with a totalitarian dictatorship. Institutionalized sexual and racial hatred are for Marxists means towards that end. The Marxists worked hand in hand with black racists, who also seek to impose a totalitarian dictatorship, though for different reasons, while the latter bleed whites dry.

Multiculturalism is not a philosophy or a science, but rather an attitude for guiding revolutionary political struggle. All words and acts must be geared towards aiding privileged identities, and harming disenfranchised identities. (This is not to be confused with identity politics. Identity politics would simply benefit members of certain groups, but in MC, members of those same groups are enemies, if they do not embrace the revolutionary struggle. Thus, a privileged, white, heterosexual male—e.g., Bill Clinton—who embraces the struggle is an ally, while a black—e.g., Clarence Thomas—who opposes it, is an enemy.)

Since inequality is the one sure thing about human (sexual, racial, etc.) groups, and hate studies all insist, the facts be damned, that all human groups are equal, and that only discrimination can explain inequality, multicultural “scholarship” consists of the constant production of lies, hoaxes (nooses, anyone?), and hate, and is imposed through school and college classroom indoctrination, diversity and sensitivity training, and news and entertainment propaganda.

Indeed, while claiming to support equality, tolerance, and compassion, multiculturalists spend all of their energies promoting hatred, intolerance, and inequality. But they play word games, defining things such that promoting hatred and discrimination against “privileged white, heterosexual males” doesn’t count as hatred and discrimination. In practice, actual privileged white, heterosexual males almost all support AA/MC, while the white men whom the multicultural alliance targets are typically working or lower-middle class, though as America becomes less white, the persecution must perforce move up the political food chain.

Just as well-to-do whites who supported AA/MC never thought they would suffer because of it, so too the privileged politicians who supported this reign of hatred never thought they would suffer under its whip. It was supposed to help Democrats demagogue against those “racist” Republicans.

For instance, during the 1993 New York City mayoral campaign pitting black socialist incumbent David Dinkins in a rematch against white liberal Republican challenger Rudolph Giuliani, one leading Democrat condemned white New York City voters, saying many white voters are “still too unwilling to vote for people who are different than we are.”

That leading Democrat was one Bill Clinton, in the first year of his presidency.

Like almost all talk about race in America, especially by socialists/multiculturalists, President Clinton’s statement must be translated out of its racial code. Since over 90 percent of black voters had voted for Dinkins in 1989, while over 30 percent of white voters had crossed racial lines by voting for him rather than Giuliani, in fact it was black voters who were “still too unwilling to vote for people who are different than we are,” and who thus needed to overcome their racism. But in multicultural rhetoric, selfish, racist speech and actions by blacks are virtuous, while any self-interested behavior on the part of whites is “racist.”

Early in President Clinton’s second term in office, he set up a phony, rigged “national dialogue on race.” Like all “dialogues” on race that white leftists and black racists call for, it was to be a monologue. After initially choosing only Democratic shills for his panel, which was chaired by black historian and race hoaxer John Hope Franklin, for one episode Clinton added a token critic of affirmative action, neo-conservative scholar, Abigail Thernstrom, for the purpose of harassing and humiliating her on live, national TV, as a proxy for all white critics of affirmative action.

(Clinton, who as president successfully fought every attempt to limit AA, also thereby got a measure of personal revenge against Thernstrom. who had just co-authored, with husband Stephan, the seminal study, America in Black & White. According to the Thernstroms, Clinton had broken the law, by having his aides, Christopher Edley and George Stephanopolous, violate Supreme Court decisions limiting affirmative action.)

Affirmative action is unconstitutional, in violating the 14th Amendment. It is illegal, in that it violates the 1964 U.S. Civil Rights Act. And it is a moral outrage. But for most blacks, as for their white patrons, support for affirmative action is a political and moral litmus test. Any white who fails that test is for them a “racist” and irredeemably evil. (I am aware that opinion polls have shown a majority of blacks nationally opposing affirmative action. Other opinion polls, cited by the Thernstroms, show almost all whites saying that they have no problem with a black family moving in next door. The one poll result is as incredible as the other.)

Supporting AA is a package deal. It includes, among other things, never criticizing blacks, excepting those few blacks who oppose affirmative action, and that any and all criticism of non-conservative blacks by whites, or their even hinting at the existence of shortcomings or pathologies of blacks for which they do not fault “white racism,” is racist.

Thus, according to the package deal, which both Clintons long ago signed off on, the only thing for white voters to do who don’t want to be guilty of racism, is to vote for Obama in the coming primaries.

And as the Great Florida Disenfranchisement Hoax of 2000 showed, if whites do not vote as blacks demand, blacks will invent a race hoax, and with their white allies, seek to steal the election.


Hillary’s “Qualifications”

Hillary Clinton has argued that voters should choose her because she is more “experienced” than Obama, but according to multicultural rhetoric, such claims (like the claim to be “more qualified”) are merely racist code phrases. Besides, she doesn’t have more experience! Obama ran in his first election in 1996, when he was elected to the Illinois State Senate. Clinton’s first election was her 2000 U.S. Senate victory, in New York. When she says she is more “experienced,” she is either lying outright, or counting her time as Arkansas’ and America’s First Lady. But that’s nonsense. “First Lady” is not an elected or appointed or any kind of post. Hillary Clinton was simply the wife of a privileged white male.

And what was her experience as First Lady? It was the experience of Travelgate, in which she engineered the malicious prosecution of White House Travel Office director Billy Dale, which ruined him financially, just so she could turn the office into a cash cow for her friend from Arkansas, socialist TV producer Harry Thomason. And Filegate, wherein Hillary Clinton collected and kept FBI files on hundreds of Republican officials and staffers whom she considered political enemies. It was the experience of conspiring to obstruct justice, when she had her chief of staff, Maggie Williams, go into the office of presidential counsel (and her old Arkansas law partner) Vince Foster, who had just committed suicide, to illegally remove files. The experience of seeking illegally, through secret meetings with her health policy guru, Ira Magaziner, to impose on America a nightmarish, socialist health scheme. And it was the experience of leveraging her status as the wife of the world’s most privileged, white, predatory, heterosexual male, into a seat in the United States Senate.

No, the “experience” issue is not in Hillary Clinton’s favor.


Blacks vs. White Feminists

Hillary Clinton has spent her adulthood supporting anti-white racism. As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

And yet, there is a separate racial issue involving blacks’ attitude towards well-to-do, assertive white feminists. While the political marriage of white, middle and upper-class feminists (most of whom are heterosexual) and middle and upper-class blacks has paid dividends for both groups, when push comes to shove, it is always the white feminists who have to take one for the team.

White feminists have for over a generation supported blacks’ every racist demand, and yet, when they show their appreciation of “color” by falling in love with a black man, instead of welcoming them into the family, black women stare daggers at them, and wish them dead. In 1999, I caught the standup routine in a Manhattan club of a white comedienne, who recalled when she had had a black boyfriend.

“I love black women. You're all so confident. You know what you think and what you want ... and Lordy, Lordy, do you hate me!”

The typical white feminist lacks such insight.

I first saw such hostility in 1978, at SUNY Stony Brook. While my beautiful, feminist, Jewish history professor was lecturing or aggressively engaging the class in discussions, a group of three black girls who sat near me would mutter hostilely about her amongst themselves.

In April 1989, a majority-black (the other members were Hispanics) gang beat a young investment banker, who came to be known as “the Central Park Jogger,” from head to toe, while sexually fondling her. (One attacker, Matias Reyes, raped her either then or after the rest of the gang had left.) Rather than show compassion for the victim, who had lost 75 percent of her blood, had spent weeks in a coma, and never fully recovered, black New Yorkers embraced her confessed attackers as victim/heroes, and demonized the white victim. Even New York’s white elites eventually came around, in 2002 granting the attackers an AA bonus, “exonerating” them. (The attacker had since of course claimed that their confessions had been coerced. Never mind that police had scrupulously respected all of the suspects’ rights, and that all but one suspect had made a videotaped confession in his parent’s or guardian’s presence.)

As Vincent Bugliosi wrote in Outrage: The Five Reasons Why O. J. Simpson Got Away With Murder, prior to O.J. Simpson’s 1995 murder trial, in mock juries black women were uniformly hostile towards prosecutor Marcia Clark, a youngish, attractive, aggressive white feminist. But you couldn’t tell Clark that. Like most white feminists, she was convinced that she knew black women, and enjoyed an easy rapport with them.

And when black women across the country exuberantly celebrated Simpson’s acquittal by a racist, black-dominated jury, they were also celebrating the murder of his white estranged wife, Nicole Brown-Simpson. (Poor Ron Goldman. O.J. murdered him, too, but outside of Goldman’s family, no one seemed to care.)

In 2000, when a black-dominated group of young men ran amok in Central Park following the Puerto Rican Day Parade, sexually molesting (and in at least one case, manually raping) largely white women, the media misrepresented the episode, as if the attackers had mostly been Hispanic, and the victims mostly black and Hispanic. Since the majority of the NYPD – which had been explicitly ordered to avoid confrontations with minority males – then consisted of white men, white feminists dutifully attacked it instead of the black assailants. But no blacks expressed sympathy for the white victims.

And of course, in March 2006, when prostitute/stripper Crystal Gail Mangum made transparently ridiculous, mutually contradictory and ever-changing charges against innocent, white Duke lacrosse players, white feminists across the country leapt to her defense, and heaped scorn on the three white men who were the real victims.

The socialist MSM and the feminists even made a point of suppressing the fact that women in Duke’s Durham, NC home had little to fear from white men, but that black men targeted white coeds for rape.

According to a March, 2006 news story from just short of two weeks after Mangum made the fraudulent charges against the white men, at which point Durham was the site of a campaign persecuting all of Duke’s white men lacrosse players,

“The [white men] students need to realize they live in a community, and people are going to talk back if they do something, or potentially [?] do something, that is disrespectful to women,” said Faulkner Fox, a visiting instructor in the English department and one of the organizers of the candlelight vigil.

Organizers at the candlelight vigil and the “wake-up call” at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd. [where some of the white lacrosse players lived, Mangum situated her hoax, and white feminists banged pots early in the morning, in order to ruin the players’ sleep], said the demonstrations were acts of support for the black exotic dancer…”

Imagine a white feminist saying anything like that about the black men who actually were raping white Duke coeds. And imagine black women organizing protests on behalf of white women victimized by black men. It seems like the more white feminists support black men, the more black men—with black women’s enthusiastic support—target them.

Hillary Clinton thinks that she is blacks’ friend, but they are not her friends.

Hillary can’t win. If she loses the nomination to Obama, she loses everything she has hoped and planned for, virtually her entire adult life. And yet, if she beats him, her victory may prove to be pyrrhic. Blacks are already insisting that Clinton only beat Obama in New Hampshire due to racism (i.e., that “racist” whites lied to pollsters). Next to come: That Hillary conspired to rig the voting machines (this rumor is already making the rounds among white leftists) to change Obama votes to Clinton votes. Blacks were never going to vote for her in the primaries anyway (they lied to reporters about being “undecided,” and to pollsters about supporting her), and will use the “racism” of the primary campaign to rationalize sitting out the general election, which could well lose it for her.

Poor Hillary. In the words of Alan Jay Lerner, “How simply frightful! How humiliating! How … delightful!”

Celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day

By Nicholas Stix
Last updated on Wednesday, January 23, 10:11 p.m.

What is the proper fashion in which to commemorate the birthday of the man whom King biographer Michael Eric Dyson has called “the greatest American who ever lived,” and who is the only American to have a national holiday in his honor? We could begin by recalling wherein the man’s greatness obtained.

• He was one of the greatest intellectual frauds in American history, having stolen his Ph.D. by plagiarizing 33 percent of the doctoral dissertation, from three years earlier, of Boston University classmate Jack Stewart Boozer, and having routinely plagiarized other men’s words in his speeches and writings, and having then copyrighted his thefts. The King cult has made an incalculable contribution to the destruction of academic standards, particularly where blacks are concerned;

• He was one of the greatest adulterers in American history, having literally had a girl (many girls, actually) or a prostitute (no disrespect to working girls intended) in every port;

• He was a great friend to communists everywhere, especially those bearing gifts of cash, and could not have done his work or even have delivered many of his speeches without communist aides and speechwriters, such as Stanley Levison and Hunter “Jack” O’Dell. On April 30, 1967, he gave a treasonous speech intended to give aid and comfort to the murderous North Vietnamese communists, in which he recited communist talking points (and which was likely written by a communist) that reversed the respective roles of America and communist North Vietnam. King told no fewer than six lies: 1. That blacks were being sent to Vietnam to fight and die in disproportionate numbers (it was whites who disproportionately bore the burden); 2. That America was guilty of racism, of murdering “little brown Vietnamese children” (it was the communists who were murdering the children, but they were King’s allies, so they were blameless); 3. That America was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” (a tip o’ the hat to VDARE’s James Fulford); 4. That communist, North Vietnamese dictator Ho Chi Min was a benevolent, freedom-loving, old soul, while South Vietnam was ruled by totalitarian monsters; 5. That American was waging war not on communist North Vietnam on behalf of the South Vietnamese people, but on the entire Vietnamese people, whom it was oppressing; and 6. That the South Vietnamese people, whom King refused to distinguish from their communist enemies, “consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy”;

• He contributed to the degradation of the black church to a partisan political organization that routinely violates the tax laws, and violates the very “constitutional principle” of the “separation of church and state” (never mind that no such principle exists in the constitution) that supporters of the King cult ruthlessly and one-sidedly impose on white Christians;

• He was America’s greatest orator, and did something that to my knowledge, no other major American orator has done. Whereas politicians typically wait for a later speech to contradict what they have claimed to be all that is near and dear to them, King accomplished this feat in the same, “I Have a Dream” speech. At different points in the speech, he both called on America to be guided by the principle of color-blindness, and to impose race-specific policies granting welfare and reparations programs to blacks. Thus did MLK contribute more than any other American to the degradation of oratory;

• He was the most celebrated leader of the so-called civil rights movement, more appropriately called the black rights movement, which through verbal legerdemain took something that is the inheritance of every legal American citizen—civil or constitutional rights—and made it the private property of blacks, including blacks that aren’t even citizens;

• He undermined the rule of law in general, as something that only whites must obey, but which must serve blacks, and particularly the principle, enshrined in the 14th Amendment of equality under the law. The 1964 U.S. Civil Rights Act, which his cultists credit him with getting enacted, has served to relegate whites to the status of second-class citizens; and

• By his own admission, he deliberately used the so-called principle of non-violence to incite violence.

One way to celebrate MLK Day would be plagiarize and copyright another writer’s words, as King did, and extort those who quote those words into paying one exorbitant sums, as his heirs did. Did you know, for instance, that I am the author of the following words?

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Another way to celebrate MLK would be to commit adultery with one’s neighbor’s wife.

One could celebrate communists (of course, we already do that every day in today’s America, though we usually don’t know it).

One could go to a political rally at a black church, though if one is white, one might not be welcome.

One could give a fork-tongued speech.

One could abuse at least one white person. For instance, if you see righteously indignant members of the oppressed beating a white oppressor (if you’ll pardon the redundancy), you could engage in the New York pastime of joining with the oppressed, and then telling the police that the oppressor had in fact attacked the oppressed, and get him arrested.

But in whichever way you choose to celebrate the birthday of “the greatest American who ever lived,” remember to keep it real, and in the spirit of MLK.

I’m Speaking about Martin Luther King Day on the Political Cesspool Tonight!

By Nicholas Stix

From 9-10 p.m. tonight, I’ll be speaking with host James Edwards on The Political Cesspool (hit this link to listen live, or to later hear the tape) about MLK Day, and about the blockbuster report I edited for the National Policy Institute, The State of White America-2007 (hit this link to get a free download).

GOP: South Carolina and Nevada

By Nicholas Stix

Sen. John McCain (Media-AZ) won today’s primary, with 33 percent of the vote. Former Gov. Mike Huckabee (Evangelicals-AR) came in second with 30 percent. Former Senator Fred Thompson (TV-TN) came in third with 16 percent, then came former Gov. Mitt Romney (Well-Groomed-MA) with 15, Ron Paul with four, and Rudy Giuliani with two percent. California Cong. Duncan Hunter tallied zero percent (actually, about a quarter of one percent).

As I had predicted, Hunter formally withdrew form the race today. He blamed no one but himself.

Although Huckabee very much needed to win in South Carolina, the majority of whose Republican voters are Christian Evangelicals, and his people were a bunch of sore losers, complaining that it was Thompsons’ “fault” he lost, he is not done. One Fox talking head said that Huckabee lacks “the money or the organization” to stay in the race without having won South Carolina, and the rest of that herd of independent thinkers echoed him. But Huckabee must come in in first or second place in Florida on January 29, or he will be done as a viable presidential contender.

Like many observers, I had predicted a fourth place finish for Romney in South Carolina, and the fact that he came one percentage shy of a tie for third is good news for his campaign. Even better news was his success in not only winning the Nevada caucuses, but in winning an absolute majority (51 percent) of all votes. He snared 18 delegates in the silver state. Interestingly, Paul finished second, with 14 percent of the vote.

Thompson needed at least a second place finish in South Carolina. He’s done, and should announce his withdrawal any day now.

Giuliani got his ears pinned back again. He is gambling on taking win or place in Florida. If he does that well, I’ll have a heart attack. People aren’t going to suddenly vote for a man who had been doing consistently terribly. As I previously predicted, he’ll hang around at least until Super Tuesday on February 5, to se if he can’t win New York and New Jersey, so as to have a chance to play kingmaker at the convention.

As Robert Novak observed tonight on Fox, “It’s a two-man race…. The last man standing looks to be McCain.”

Let us hope Novak is wrong about McCain.

* * *

Fox had a young man named Chris Something from politico.com on as an analyst, who could not utter a single sentence without the dreadful redundancy “moving forward,” either at its beginning or its end. Someone needs to tell him that that particular barbarism does not make him sound intelligent.

The Knoxville Horror Never Happened, and There are No Marxists, Says Reader

By Nicholas Stix

The following letter came today from one of my legions of devoted Marxist readers:

In regard to your "Crime, Race, The Media, And "Anti-Racism"" article,
I feel it is necessary to make a few comments about the statements you
make.
Speaking as a close friend of several people who attended the entire
Mountain Justice Summer weekend in Tennessee, I know that the event
was about environmental impact. The "Coup Clutz Clowns" are not a
"front" for this organization, they're a persona adopted by the
counter-protesters to better demonstrate their message. MJS has
nothing to hide.

For such a passionate denouncer of the MSM, you seem to take a large
part of your impression of an event from media publications. Why do
you imply that most of the MJS delegation was from out of town? What
information besides media omission do you have to support this claim?

I seem to not understand. Please explain.

-A
* * *
My Marxist fan was referring to the following section from my October 31 VDARE article, “The Knoxville Horror: Crime, Race, The Media, and ‘Anti-Racism’”:

Linder’s First Rally

On May 26, [white supremacist Alex] Linder’s demonstrators are greeted by three hundred city, county, state and federal law enforcement officers in riot gear, who have spent weeks preparing for them.

The local and regional MSM claim that less than 30 protesters showed up. Reporters employ the propaganda tactic of asking all protesters where they came from, and describing them as out-of-state "white supremacists," and the demonstration as a "hate rally." In vilifying the protesters, while denying that the atrocity was racially motivated, local media imply that the protesters are worse than the rapist-torturer-murderers.

"Anti-Racists"

According to the ideology of "anti-racism" promoted by those who currently dominate the media, public schools, academia and "activist" organizations, blacks cannot, by definition, be guilty of racism, whereas whites are, by definition, racist. All blacks, no matter how rich, are victims, while all whites, no matter how poor, are privileged. Got it?

"Anti-racists" hate whites the way Alex Linder hates Jews.

Oddly, the majority of people who call themselves "anti-racists" are themselves white. And they are at times openly racist towards law-abiding blacks and blacks who do not hate whites sufficiently, particularly black Republicans and conservatives.

Sounds crazy? That’s because this stuff is crazy.

Virtually all Americans have encountered "anti-racism," aka "multiculturalism" and
"diversity education," in one form or another, most explicitly through diversity training in workplaces and educational institutions. In diversity training, whites are racially abused by vicious, dishonest trainers, who make a good living doing this.

Hate pays.


The First Counter-Rally

A lily-white contingent of men and women, all clad in long, frilly white dresses, simultaneously held a counter-rally.

The media identify the anti-white counter-demonstrators as "environmentalists" and as the "Coup Clutz Clowns," and imply that they are locals. They claim that twice as many of them showed up as those protesting the killings.

There are no "Coup Clutz Clowns." The name is a front that groups from different training camps of the "environmentalist" group, Mountain Justice Summer (MJS), in West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee use when they disrupt the demonstrations of groups they oppose.

Why would "environmentalists" be so concerned about a demonstration against black-on-white murders? Because they aren't environmentalists.

"Environmentalism" is yet another front for a revolutionary Marxist outfit that seeks to destroy America through open borders and pseudo-scientific, "environmental" accords such as the Kyoto Protocol. (For the leftwing takeover of the American environmental movement, see here and here.)

Only one MSM report I find on the rally mentions Mountain Justice Summer, but without revealing its true character.

MJS training camps, which teach civil disobedience and manipulation of the legal system, are among the successors to communist training camps such as the Monteagle, Tennessee-based, Highlander Folk School.

The local media can find only one MJS counter-demonstrator from Knoxville, lawyer Chris Irwin. (Irwin is not wearing a dress.)

No news accounts of the rally report that Irwin is MJS' Knoxville "co-coordinator" [sic]. He is also the leader of "Knoxville Anti-Racist Action."

Local print and TV "reporters" make no attempt to hide their agenda, emphasizing with unwittingly comical exaggeration Irwin's local roots, while apparently not asking the other anti-white counter-protesters—who are from all over the country—where they hail from.

“Reporters” also refrain from politically identifying the counter-demonstrators as they do the demonstrators, say as "racists," "Marxists," or "extremists."

“Reporter” Mike McCarthy, of CBS' Knoxville affiliate, WVLT, approvingly quotes Irwin's surreal statements: "It's not the 1950s anymore!" as if the victims were black; and of the protesters, "They're not just a knife at the throat of the African American and [illegal] immigrant communities, they're a threat to us all."

One may debate how much sympathy the Jew-obsessed WS/NN/Ws really feel for Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom. But they do passionately express sympathy for the victims and their loved ones. The lack of any expression of sympathy for the victims and their families —or even mention of their names—by MJS' "anti-racists," however, is because … they feel no sympathy for them.

Knoxville Voice staff activist, Hilary Trenda, brags that the KPD colluded with the anti-white counter-demonstrators:

"KPD Lt. Robert Hubbs contacted Knoxville Voice May 25 while preparing security plans for the rally, expressing a desire to work with the counter-protestors and alleviate any surprises to KPD."[“At the End of the Day We Still Love You!" May 31 2007]

At the Christian/Newsom rally, Hal Turner says,

"[First,] we want to tell the liberal media we are tired of them spiking stories about black-on-white crime. Our second goal is to tell the black community they have to restrain their black hoodlums." [Police arrest organizer at 'rally against genocide', By Matt Lakin, Knoxnews.com, May 27, 2007]

Many of the pro-white protesters yell at their anti-white opponents, "If you're against racism, why weren't you here protesting the crime?"

* * *

I sent the following note to “Anonymous.”

What a pleasure to hear from you, Anonymous! I always love it when nameless people send me itty-bitty notes making unsubstantiated claims about yet other nameless ones, while demanding that I explain myself from scratch, as if I hadn't already written a 15,000-word article on the matter to be "explained."

The "Coup Clutz Clowns" are not a
"front" for this organization, they're a persona adopted by the
counter-protesters to better demonstrate their message. MJS has
nothing to hide.

Then why did they fail to mention that they were at the demo representing MJS? Or did they tell reporters, who in turn suppressed that information, believing that would better help MJS?

For such a passionate denouncer of the MSM, you seem to take a large
part of your impression of an event from media publications. Why do
you imply that most of the MJS delegation was from out of town?

I didn't "imply" it, I said it.

What information besides media omission do you have to support this claim?

What information do you have to discredit it?

I have some more questions for you:

1. Why would an “environmentalist” group try to sabotage a protest against racist violence?

2. Put differently, why would an “environmentalist” group support racist violence?

3. Why would an “environmentalist” group oppose the best available measure against pollution in the U.S. (a moratorium on all immigration)?

4. Why would an “environmentalist” group support measures intended to destroy Western economies, while not supporting any such measures against the two nations that will soon be (if they are not already) the world's biggest industrial polluters?

Please explain.

And I resemble the disrespect you showed the MSM's coverage of the counter-demonstration. Those folks bent over backwards to help your alleged friends.

* * *

I just noticed something, in preparing this post for publication. “Anonymous” did not cite the full title of my article; he cut out the beginning, “The Knoxville Horror.” For she/he/it, there was no Knoxville Horror.

For background on Alex "Don't Call Me a Neo-Nazi" Linder, read the following three-part interview.

“The White Supremacist, the Jew, and the Knoxville Horror,” October 31, 2007.

“The White Supremacist, the Jew, and the Knoxville Horror,” Part II, October 31, 2007.

“The White Supremacist, the Jew, and the Knoxville Horror,” Part III, October 31, 2007.

My previous stories on the Knoxville Horror follow.

“The Knoxville Horror: The Crime and the Cover-Up,” May 14.

“Shame on You, Michelle Malkin! A Republican Diva, Journalistic Ethics, and the Knoxville Horror,” May 17, 2007.

“Another Michelle Malkin Stooge Gets the Knoxville Horror Story Wrong,” May 17, 2007.

“Knoxville Horror: Trial Dates Set; MSM “Discovers” Case; Bloggers Continue Spreading Rumors,” May 21, 2007.

“Credibility SUNsets: Dave Lucas, the New York Sun, and the Knoxville Horror,” May 25, 2007.

“The Knoxville Horror: The Crime and the Media Blackout,” July 2007.

“Hunting Fugitives is No Job for Tommy Lee Jones,” July 6, 2007.

“The Knoxville Horror: Crime, Race, the Media, and ‘Anti-Racism,’” October 31, 2007.

White Supremacy and Plagiarism at CNN," January 18, 2008.

White Supremacy and Plagiarism at CNN

By Nicholas Stix

On May 29, the CNN show, Paula Zahn Now did a story—well, sort of—on the crime I have dubbed the Knoxville Horror. In that January 7, 2007 atrocity, a young white couple—Channon Gail Christian, 21, and Christopher Newsom Jr., 23—were carjacked, kidnapped, both gang-raped, tortured and murdered in Knoxville, Tennessee. Four suspects in the rape-murder and one who is charged with being an accessory after the fact, all of whom are black, are in custody. Defendants Letalvis “Rome” Cobbins, Lemaricus “Slim” Davidson, George Geovonni “Detroit” Thomas and Vanessa Coleman are scheduled to be tried in separate state trials, beginning from May to August. In December, Knox County District Attorney General Randy Nichols announced that he will seek the death penalty for Cobbins, Davidson, Thomas and Coleman. Eric Boyd is charged with having harbored the fugitive Davidson after the slayings, and will be tried in federal court next month as an accessory after the fact to carjacking, which is a federal crime.

I say Paula Zahn Now “sort of” did a story, because guest host Kiran Chetry and reporter Rusty Dornin were not so much reporting on the crime as on the protests against the crime as yet another example of rampant, racially motivated black-on-white violence by what they referred to as “white supremacists.” (I refer to them as “white supremacist/neo-Nazi/whatevers –WS/NN/Ws.)

Reporter Rusty Dornin interviewed Knoxville News Sentinel reporter Jamie Satterfield in her newspaper’s offices, where Satterfield complained about all of the hate mail she’d been getting from white “racists” charging her with covering up the racial nature of the crime.

Satterfield is, to my knowledge, the only journalist to write more on the Knoxville Horror than I have. Prior to last May, she stuck to the facts of the case, but as the first, May 26 rally neared, she began producing editorials disguised as news stories, or what I call “reportorials,” attacking anyone who would state the obvious, to wit, that the kidnapping, gang rape, torture and murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom were racially motivated.

Though Dornin never mentioned me by name, she suggested I am also a “white supremacist,” when she showed a screen capture shot of my May 14 American Renaissance Web report on the Knoxville Horror, as she narrated, “Sites with white supremacist agendas made their own headlines.” (Read the transcript here. See the video here.)

Dornin neglected to tell her viewers that that “white supremacist” Web site was where she (or her producer) had learned that Hal Turner had spread the rumor that the attackers had genitally mutilated their victims, which had burned across the Internet; thus, it was her primary source for that story. The genital mutilation rumor and an interview with Turner are among the highlights of her story. (The parenthetical references to Dornin’s producer are because in TV news magazines, typically the producer researches and writes the story, and even conducts the on-camera interviews. The so-called reporter is typically a mere performer reading the script the producer wrote for her.)

Since the other main aspect of Dornin’s broadcast, the May 26 Knoxville protest, had already been covered by the Knoxville media, without my work, Dornin would have simply echoed the Knoxville media, none of whom had tracked down the rumor. It was her plagiary of my work that allowed her to deceive her viewers into thinking she had done original research.

But why, a skeptical reader might ask, should anyone believe that Dornin plagiarized my May 14 story?

1. The screen capture shot of my May 14 story acknowledges that either she or her producer (depending on who wrote her script) read my story;

2. No one prior to me had tracked the genital mutilation rumors back to their source; and

3. Dornin even plagiarized an error I had made in my May 14 article, in identifying Turner as living “in New York.” He lives in New Jersey. I corrected that error in a revised, expanded version of the article that American Renaissance published in its July, 2007 issue.


Thus, there was nothing original in Dornin’s story.

(CNN identifies Turner as “HAL TURNER, EXTREMIST INTERNET BLOGGER,” rather than as a radio host, in order to use him for its ends, but without granting the quid pro quo of letting him gain any listeners. That’s not cricket. I am unaware of CNN ever identifying a leftist or black or mestizo racial supremacist as an “extremist,” or refusing to identify a radio host with such politics as a radio host. As it is, Turner is no longer broadcasting, but he was at the time.)

If American Renaissance has a “white supremacist agenda[s],” what does that make a reporter who plagiarizes American Renaissance?

Had Dornin done her homework regarding American Renaissance, she would know that its founder, Jared Taylor, has pointed out that he could more accurately be called an “Asian supremacist” than a white supremacist. Taylor is a race realist.

(For the record, while I consider myself a race realist, anyone who knows me knows that the notion that I would identify so strongly with any human collectivity that I would derive my feelings of superiority from membership in it, is ludicrous. If I were an adherent of any ideology, it would be that of Marxism: The philosophy, science, and praxis of Groucho Marx.)

Plagiarism is such a big issue because it involves stealing another person’s labor and an utter lack of intellectual (in this case, journalistic) integrity. It took me just under two months and over 200 hours to put together my May 14 story. Since Dornin or her producer ripped off my work, and used previously shot film of the May 16 rally, the story’s only time requirement involved the producer or an assistant reading my article and a few others, and Dornin or the producer flying out to Knoxville for one day to interview Satterfield. Had viewers known that Dornin and her producer had ripped off my story, they would have had a much different reaction to the script’s condemnation of American Renaissance as having “white supremacist agendas.”

One month after Paula Zahn Now presented its plagiarized Knoxville Horror story, CNN cancelled the program, which aired for the last time on August 2. Even stealing other people’s work could not buck up the show’s anemic ratings. The network did not make an offer to Zahn to continue working for it.

Zahn was replaced by host Rick Sanchez, who recently made a fool of himself trying to hype a minor, humorous moment in the John McCain campaign into a scandal. At a public forum, a female follower of the Arizona senator had asked of New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, “How do we beat the bitch?” In a desperate attempt to turn the moment into a story, Sanchez editorialized on-air endlessly about it, claiming that it had offended all women everywhere, or at least those among his studio staff, while presenting his socialist and feminist bona fides to viewers.

Googling under CNN + “plagiarism policy” returned 367 entries of stories that CNN did on other institutions’ plagiarism problems. This story will, to my knowledge, be the first entry on a plagiary committed by CNN.

It’s been a bad year for “TV news reader” Paula Zahn, who after having for years squandered all of her money on shopping sprees, cheated on her real-estate mogul husband of 22 years with another tycoon, was cancelled by CNN, and, in an attempt to squeeze her husband in divorce court, let herself be publicly humiliated by her divorce attorney.

Rusty Dornin is still a “reporter” for CNN.

My previous stories on the Knoxville Horror follow.

“The Knoxville Horror: The Crime and the Cover-Up,” May 14.

“Shame on You, Michelle Malkin! A Republican Diva, Journalistic Ethics, and the Knoxville Horror,” May 17, 2007.

“Another Michelle Malkin Stooge Gets the Knoxville Horror Story Wrong,” May 17, 2007.

“Knoxville Horror: Trial Dates Set; MSM “Discovers” Case; Bloggers Continue Spreading Rumors,” May 21, 2007.

“Credibility SUNsets: Dave Lucas, the New York Sun, and the Knoxville Horror,” May 25, 2007.

“The Knoxville Horror: The Crime and the Media Blackout,” July 2007.

“Hunting Fugitives is No Job for Tommy Lee Jones,” July 6, 2007.

“The Knoxville Horror: Crime, Race, the Media, and ‘Anti-Racism,’” October 31, 2007.

“The White Supremacist, the Jew, and the Knoxville Horror,” October 31, 2007.

“The White Supremacist, the Jew, and the Knoxville Horror,” Part II, October 31, 2007.

“The White Supremacist, the Jew, and the Knoxville Horror,” Part III, October 31, 2007.

After Michigan, GOP Has a Four-Way Race: Romney, Huckabee, McCain and the Media

With Mitt Romney’s bounce-back win in yesterday’s GOP Michigan primary, the Republican race is properly chaotic, and shall remain that way until at least through February 5’s Super Tuesday, offering the media and political junkies the equivalent of a seven-game World Series, and endless opportunities for mixed metaphors.

McCain

In Michigan on Tuesday, Sen. John “I'll build the goddamn fence if they want it” McCain (Media-AZ) lost to Romney 39 to 30 percent, with Huckabee getting 16 percent, because McCain had to count on Republicans to vote for him. McCain had won in New Hampshire, because it runs semi-open primaries, in which independent voters may vote either in the GOP or Democratic primary. In Michigan, a candidate has to win the GOP primary with GOP votes. Like Michigan, most states run closed primaries (i.e., in which one may only vote in the primary of the party in which one is registered); if McCain were so beloved by GOP voters outside of New Hampshire, he would already have won the party’s nomination in 2000.

What a radical notion. As former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer, now a CNN analyst, observed of McCain, “He can’t win among Republicans. He wins among independents, he wins among Democrats.”

(Rounding out the field, Paul got six percent of the vote, Thompson four, Giuliani three, “Uncommitted” two and California Cong. Duncan Hunter one percent. Look for Hunter to drop out any day now.)

While McCain has an even chance to win South Carolina (24 delegates) on January 19, and perhaps a forty percent chance in Florida (57 delegates) ten days later, without help from the media, it’s going to be all downhill from there. (In Nevada’s January 19 caucuses, 34 delegates are up for grabs, but even “experts” don’t claim to be able to divine the will of that state’s Republicans. On February 5’s Super Tuesday, the only state where McCain is a lock is his home state of Arizona, where 53 delegates are at stake.)

When McCain gets independent and Democratic votes in primaries, while it is hard to gauge the former’s electoral significance, the latter have no significance for the general election. These are people who are voting against the Republican Party or engaging in mischief, but the “or” is a distinction without a difference. Democratic voters who voted for McCain in the primary will virtually all vote Democratic in the general election, unless Romney is the candidate, and he can develop a “Reagan Democrat”-style, populist groundswell. That is because Democratic voters understand that McCain is the same stalking horse today that he was in 2000.

But what if McCain should miraculously—or more likely, with yet more media help (say, well-timed exposés on Romney and Huckabee)—end up winning the GOP nomination? Since the media created him, they should love that, and help him win the White House, no? No. As I have previously argued, the media did not adopt McCain and his “Straight Talk Express” in 2000, in order to help him win the presidency, but in order to ensure that he and the Republican Party did not win it.

As I recently wrote regarding a 1989 racial imbroglio pitting the media against comic Jackie Mason and then-New York City mayoral candidate Rudy Giuliani, “journalistic ethics experts’” talking points notwithstanding, most scribes routinely suppress or report impolitic remarks made to them in private by public figures, based solely on feelings of political, ethnic, and/or racial loyalty or enmity. As VDARE’s Steve Sailer wrote already during the 2000 campaign, and James Fulford recalled last week, in response to the New Republic hit piece on Ron Paul,

… most of [McCain’s] longtime colleagues in the Senate seem to dread the idea of such a hate-filled man becoming President.

On the other hand, the bigfoot reporters who ride with him in the back of his campaign bus, and listen to Senator McCain's non-stop John Rocker-style diatribes have fallen madly in love with him, on the Straight Talk Express they get to hear those meaty truths that can't be uttered in their own feminized, racially-sensitized newsrooms. The reporters don't report 95% of what the candidate tells them because, of course, the hoi polloi couldn't be trusted to listen in on such inflammatory statements.

Sailer argued that McCain stayed in the reporters’ good graces in part by constantly badmouthing white bogey men: Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, George W. Bush, and the three Bob Joneses.

Maybe Sailer is right about the reporters falling in love with McCain, but they didn’t marry him. They still had to dutifully report back daily to their pc editors, and at the end of the job, go back to their pc wives and pc newsrooms. The reporters did not keep McCain’s impolitic statements from their editors; the editors simply chose to sit on them, while waiting for a more opportune moment. Since McCain never won the nomination, that moment did not come. It may yet.

And while the reporters may have held McCain in personal affection, I have to disagree with Sailer as to what determined the content of their dispatches. Unless sex is involved (as in the reporter sleeping with a subject), reporters do not usually let personal affection get in the way of politics.

To appreciate the situation whereby a Republican candidate has socialist/communist/whatever reporters (for that’s what they are, as even McCain notes in his affectionate jokes about the “Trotskyite” vote he rides with on the bus) traveling along with him, whenever you read the word “reporters” in stories on the GOP candidate, replace it with “opposition researchers,” because that’s their true function. Their job is, ultimately, to help the Democratic candidate win. And if McCain should win the nomination, come October, you will read the most vicious “exposés” written about a Republican politician since Los Angeles Times editor John Carroll’s desperate 2003 dirty tricks campaign to sink Arnold Schwarzenegger’s California gubernatorial campaign in that year’s revolutionary recall election. The Times’ opposition researchers promoted the stories of women who claimed to have been “sexually harassed” by Schwarzenegger back in his Hollywood days. That the Times’ campaign failed was due to the hatred that Democratic then-Gov. Gray Davis had managed to cultivate among California voters, the racism and ineptitude of Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, and, most important of all, the Reagan-like magnetism of the itinerant Austrian politician.


Romney

The biggest loser in New Hampshire was Mitt Romney, the Mormon former Massachussetts governor who plowed millions of dollars of his own money into a massive ad campaign, gave a dominant performance – in my opinion, and that of the focus group interviewed by pollster Frank Luntz – in the Fox News GOP debate, and emphasized not giving an amnesty to illegal immigrants. As I wrote following New Hampshire, Romney had to win in Michigan, where his late father George served as a liberal Republican governor, or he was done as a contender (though not as a possible VP nominee). But if Romney took Michigan, he would be back as a contender, and campaigning with a vengeance in all 23 Super Tuesday states holding primaries, caucuses of conventions on February 5.

Well, he’s b-a-a-a-ck!

After New Hampshire, as Romney and his people reminded everyone, he still led the pack with 24 GOP delegates to Huckabee’s 18 and McCain’s 10 (Paul had six). Following Michigan, CNN has two sets of different delegate counts.

By one count, Romney now has 52 delegates, Huckabee has 22, McCain 15, Thompson six, Paul two, and Giuliani and Hunter one each. In addition to delegates won in caucuses and primaries that have already been held, this count includes delegates from states that have not yet held primaries or caucuses but that have nonetheless already “pledged” to certain candidates. Note, however, that such pledges are not permanent. At a certain point, such as at the Party’s nominating convention, pledged delegates may be free to switch their support. (Even this CNN count is different each time I hit the link anew, a day after the vote count is over.)

The other, more conservative count is, I believe, more realistic. By that total, Romney now has 46 delegates, Huckabee 19, McCain 15, Thompson six, Paul two, and Hunter one.

Romney has overspent using his own money, is not getting federal matching funds because of that, which will hurt him down the road (Romney is wealthy, but he’s no Mike Bloomberg), and is heading into states (South Carolina, Florida) where McCain and Huckabee will be very strong. Thus, he has to raise a lot of money in a hurry.

On January 19, South Carolina is up. It’s as conservative a state as there is in the Union, its Republican voters are overwhelmingly Evangelical Christian (actually so are its Democrat voters, but for political reasons the media refuse to use the same terms—“Evangelical,” “fundamentalist”—to describe black Christians whose religious beliefs are identical to their white brethren), and it has the highest concentration of active and retired military of any state. Thus, like many observers, I expect Romney to finish fourth, behind either Huckabee or McCain in first, and Fred Thompson in third place. Because of that expectation, Romney can only be hurt there if he finishes worse than fourth. Anything better, and he comes out smelling like a rose, and whoever he beats among the other three is in trouble, especially if Romney beats Huckabee.

Looking down the road, I do not expect Romney to do well in Florida on January 26. On February 5’s Super Tuesday of 14 primaries, eight caucuses and the West Virginia state convention, I expect Romney to take the California, Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware, Massachussetts and Utah primaries. Illinois, with its corrupt, bipartisan “Combine,” its liberal Republican Party long at war with its largely conservative GOP base, is a mystery to me, though I give Romney at least an even chance of taking it. (To get a feel for the Illinois GOP, “The Combine,” and “the Chicago way,” read Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass.) I don’t profess to any expertise regarding the caucus states, but I would expect Romney to do poorly in the Southern ones and others where party activists are heavily Evangelical. (Caucuses will be held in Alaska, American Samoa, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Minnesota, Montana and North Dakota.)

Republican TV pundits and official, credentialed GOP bloggers (and Romney’s handlers, if only because of the aforementioned groups) have been obsessing over Romney’s good looks and hair. First, they worried that he was too pretty and well-groomed; now they enthuse that he perspired a little in his Michigan victory speech (Fox’ Fred Barnes), that a hair was out of place (townhall.com’s Mary Katharine Ham, says the Fox crew), and that he got excited and spoke without a script (the whole Fox team).

A national political candidate is a wondrous thing. He must look like Mr. Confidence in public, yet in private, he and his image consultants are so insecure that, like the next policy flip-flop, the next makeover is only one negative poll or primary loss away.

And while the disgruntled guardians of the socialist MSM, including the journalism school bosses, continue to recycle the same years-old talking point clichés about the supposed shortcomings of the “24-hour news cycle,” they continue to ignore the real story of that cycle. And that is a story of filler. Fox News and CNN fill time rerunning entire shows, chewing over the same polls and speeches, again and again, and broadcasting film of the same “breaking developments” and interviews on endless loop, with the occasional new splice for the appearance of change.

(The MSM/J schools’ favorite talking point against cable news—meaning Fox News—is that stories get rushed into broadcast without the proper vetting of sources, even though the MSM’s track record tends to be even worse, in this regard, as witness the Mary Mapes-Dan Rather Memogate scandal, the aforementioned corrupt conduct of the L.A. Times in the 2003 California recall election, and the massive hoaxes engineered by the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 2005, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and the summer, 2006 Lebanon photo fraud scandal in which Reuters, U.S. News & World Report, the New York Times, CNN, the Associated Press, Guardian, ITV and NBC participated.)


Huckabee

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee continues to be the biggest positive surprise of the campaign.

Mike Huckabee was badly hurt by New Hampshire voters who were hostile to the Evangelical religiosity that Republican Iowa caucusers found so endearing. But with third place showings (11 and 16 percent, rspectively) in New Hampshire and Michigan, his win in Iowa, and Southern states, where his Evangelical Christian base is dominant, coming up, Huckabee’s candidacy is very much alive.

He has an even or better chance of taking South Carolina, and if he finishes at least second there, should take at least five of the 14 state primaries being held on Super Tuesday, February 5. (His home state of Arkansas, Oklahoma, Georgia, Alabama and Missouri.)

Huckabee has hit on a variation of the McCain formula: Play to the media over the heads of the Republican base, and count on the media to sell him to people who otherwise wouldn’t vote for him. Huckabee cannot honestly approach GOP voters, because his liberal positions (pro-welfare state, open borders, amnesty) are anathema to them, and indeed, he has come up with an immigration enforcement story for the primaries. Unlike McCain, however, Huckabee has the support of the GOP’s biggest constituency, Evangelical Christians.

‘Tis a puzzlement, when one considers that that very constituency is extremely conservative. Huckabee has mixed the McCain media formula with the Bush strategy of manipulating Evangelicals whom one privately holds in contempt. This became obvious a few years ago, through Bush’s liberal policies, and eventually became the subject of a book-length expose by an Evangelical former Bush staffer, who wrote that the Bush people considered Evangelicals nuts, and when not courting them at election time, wouldn’t give them the time of day.

While I find much to like in Evangelicals’ moral and political beliefs, their embrace of Huckabee, after having been made a fool of for eight years by Bush, does not give one confidence in their political judgment.

As Mike Scruggs has written of the Evangelicals, “A sizeable number of them feel that because [Huckabee] is a born-again Christian, he will automatically do the right thing.”

Evangelicals’ role within the GOP is not unlike that of blacks within the Democratic Party. Evangelicals are the Party’s most faithful and largest constituency, yet the Party takes their votes for granted. But the GOP treats the Evangelicals, who make up a much larger proportion of Republican voters than blacks are of Democrats, worse than the Dems treat blacks. Non-Evangelical GOP Party operatives reportedly roll their eyes in regards to Evangelical leaders, and call them crazies behind their backs, something Democratic operatives don’t do regarding the most vicious, racist black leaders.

So, when are Evangelicals going to wake up and smell the coffee? Don’t hold your breath waiting.


Thompson

Actor and former Tennessee senator Fred Thompson is doing better than anyone had a right to expect. He came in fourth in Michigan, and gave a brilliant performance in Fox’ South Carolina debate. Unfortunately, even Republican voters who like him told pollsters and reporters that it was “too little, too late,” and that he is not electable. That is odd when you consider that 1,191 delegates are required for the nomination, and not even Romney has five percent of that number. And yet, people do like to project a sense of inevitability upon the candidate they choose, employing the circular psychology whereby, instead of deciding on which candidate’s views they agree with, voting for him, and hoping enough others agree to make him the nominee, they project who they think other people will vote for onto a candidate, and then vote for him, in the hopes that their belief in his “electability” will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s all a hall of mirrors.

I like Fred Thompson, but for better or worse, he has failed to con voters into believing that other voters believe he is destined to win. And I’m not sure I trust him. While I don’t like candidates who cannot cogently take their case to voters (Ron Paul), I mistrust those who are a little too smooth.

South Carolina should be Thompson’s last hurrah. He should finish in the top three. If he finishes higher, it will probably be at McCain’s expense, and might mortally wound him, were it not for his media net. I expect Thompson to fold his tent after Florida, at the latest.


Giuliani

The biggest loser so far has been former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani. Fox did everything it could to help him. The network invited him to its New Hampshire GOP debate, and Hannity & Colmes host Sean Hannity had him on his talk show immediately thereafter, while the same network did everything it could to sabotage the candidacy of libertarian Texas Cong. Ron Paul, whom it refused to invite to the New Hampshire debate, and then invited to the South Carolina debate, only to ambush him.

(I understand that media companies exist as much to exercise illegitimate political power as they do to make billions of dollars, but according to tradition, they are supposed to at least feign impartiality. Bad form, Fox.)

With all of the precincts counted, Giuliani barely beat Paul, nine to eight percent, a difference of a mere 2,092 votes out of 233,381 GOP votes in New Hampshire. A few months ago, Giuliani had practically been coronated as the Republican standard-bearer. And yet in Iowa, where he did not vigorously campaign (because he knew he was going to get thrashed), he only finished in sixth place in the caucuses, with four percent of the vote. But after campaigning full time in New Hampshire, with nothing to show for it, his campaign was on life support going into Michigan. And in Michigan, he couldn’t even beat the much-maligned Ron Paul! Paul took six percent of the vote, to Giuliani’s three percent. Giuliani beat only “Uncommitted” and Cong. Duncan Hunter, and depending on the CNN tab, is either tied with Hunter for last with a solitary delegate, or off the table with none.

I am deeply disappointed in Giuliani. Not that I ever planned on voting for him. But still, this is the man who whipped Al Sharpton and the New York media. And any man who can marry his own cousin (his first marriage), and later look a reporter who asked about that choice in the eye and say, “I didn’t know that,” is clearly a liar of presidential proportions.

Look for Giuliani to hang on at least until Super Tuesday, at which point he should take New York (101 delegates) as a favorite son. If he holds on to those delegates, in a tough race, they could put him in a strong bargaining position to make a claim on the cabinet slot of attorney general or secretary of homeland security, in exchange for releasing his delegates to the candidate who eventually prevails.


Paul

Depending on how you look at it, Texas Cong. Ron Paul was a big loser or a big winner in New Hampshire. He was a big loser, because outside perhaps his home state of Texas (March 4, 140), where he runs as favorite son, New Hampshire may have been his last chance to break into the top three vote-getters. But he was a big winner, in coming in merely one point behind Giuliani, despite Fox’ closing him out of the Saturday debate, and in exposing Fox News’ machinations and causing the state GOP to publicly denounce Fox, and withdraw from its partnership with the network on the eve of the debate.

When the New Hampshire results came in, I wrote that if Paul continues his campaign, he would be running as much against Fox News as he would be against the other Republican candidates, and that the other networks should love that, and accordingly reward him with free publicity.

But early January 8, the day of the New Hampshire primary, something happened that changed everything. The New Republic published an “exposé” on Paul, “Angry White Man,” by one of its opposition researchers, an assistant editor named James Kirchick. (Why is it a virtue for a black man to be angry, but a mortal sin for a white man to be? Oh, I just remembered. It’s because the black man is reacting to the battalions of marauding whites who daily target innocent blacks for robberies, assaults, rapes and murders.)

Here is the gist of what Kirchik says. In a money-making newsletter Paul sold under his name from the mid-1970s until the mid-1990s, he promoted racism, homophobia, conspiracist thinking and anti-Semitism.

And though Fox News relented to invite Paul to its January 10 South Carolina GOP debate, it was only so that it could ambush and humiliate him. And as I will show, Paul did himself no favors that night. And yet, in spite of all of the bad publicity, Paul still managed to finish in fourth place, with six percent of the vote, ahead of Thompson, Giuliani and Hunter.

Depending on how desperate the media are to stop Paul, and how driven he is to stick it to them and to the GOP establishment, a third party (or fourth party, considering the Bloomberg Factor) run by Paul could do serious short-term damage to the MSM’s—socialist and Republican alike—pc control of political debate.

The foregoing was a teaser; a later article will address the Ron Paul “scandal.” Tune in, same bat channel, same bat time!

Ruthless People: Rathergate Producer Mary Mapes, CBS News, and the Chicago All-Stars

By Nicholas Stix
Originally published December 13, 2004

(Any day now, CBS News' internal Rathergate report will be read by the executive suits at CBS’ “Black Rock” fortress, and producer Mary Mapes will likely be fired.)

A few weeks ago, at Rather Biased, I came across a story about a CBS News producer who'd been fired, "CBS Fires Trigger-happy Producer." "So, they finally got around to Mary Mapes," says I. No such luck. The tarnished Tiffany network had unceremoniously dumped a news producer for interrupting a broadcast of its popular new crime series, CSI: New York, for a report on the death of Arab terrorist Yasser Arafat. It seems while honesty in reporting counts for little at CBS these days, hot entertainment properties are sacred.

The November 13 Rather Biased dispatch follows:

"Friday both Reuters and Broadcasting and Cable magazine reported that CBS has fired the producer it blamed for preempting the network's popular 'CSI: New York' show to announce the death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

"According to Reuters, the yet-to-be-named female producer ignored ‘explicit, advance instructions' that the official news of Arafat's death was not to interrupt regular programming. She also allegedly ignored CBS standard procedures which require the consent of a News Division executive to sign off on all such preemptions.

"The former CBSer is said to have been a producer at the network's insomniac news program ‘Up to the Minute,' which is used as a proving ground for young and inexperienced staffers.

"The firing is the second step the Viacom-owned web has taken to atone for its sin against its hot property ‘CSI.' Earlier in the week, CBS posted a message of apology on its web site and emailed a similar one to its affiliates.

"While the network's decision to apologize and fire the offending producer has raised eyebrows of some viewers, we suspect that most people would support the decision given that the news of Arafat's passing was not exactly a top concern of Americans – particularly of those who had deliberately avoided the cable news death watch by watching an entertainment show.

"Like many of our readers, however, we do wonder why the preemption of 'CSI' is an immediate firing offense at CBS while deliberately ignoring warnings about forged documents in a blockbuster story is not."

Granted, the producer had violated a direct order not to interrupt the show without the permission of a superior officer. TV executives may have contempt for the military chain of command, but have zero tolerance for insubordination on their own turf.

Mary Mapes is the CBS News producer who most recently brought us the Abu Ghraib and Rathergate stories. The Abu Ghraib story presented American soldiers in charge of a section of the Abu Ghraib military detainee facility reserved for terrorists, as if they were torturers and war criminals. The story, which was reported separately by Mapes for CBS News and Sy Hersh for the New Yorker, represented in both cases an instance of defining journalistic deviance down. Hersh and Mapes both sought to recreate the scandal of Vietnam's My Lai massacre, but without the massacre. This is what happens when journalists go from seeing themselves as patriots supporting America , as they did in World War II, to seeing themselves as revolutionaries, destroying her, as they have since the War in Vietnam.

In Rathergate, Mapes used forged documents in an attempt to cost George W. Bush re-election, by presenting the then-Texas Air National Guard officer as a shirker, as insubordinate, and possibly even a deserter who succeeded only through the intervention of powerful friends.

Mapes' source for the forgeries, Bill Burkett, a former Texas Air National Guard lieutenant colonel with a longtime, public grudge against the Bushes, argued in his defense that he did not seek out Mapes; she sought him out. (Burkett has also denied that he produced the forgeries, though no one has been able to find the mystery woman that, he claims, gave him the forgeries.) At the time, CBS claimed Mapes had been "working on" the story for five years, yet she had nothing to show for it, prior to Burkett giving her the forgeries. And in spite of CBS News' document experts having doubts about the documents' authenticity, Mapes rushed the story onto the air four days later.

The September 19 New York Times quoted Mapes' executive producer, Josh Howard as saying, ''Mary Mapes told us her source made her completely confidentabout where they came from, and that they were authentic, and that made me confident..."

In an earlier, pre-TV era, Mary Mapes would have been fired for even suggesting the Abu Ghraib story to a major newspaper's editor. Prior to the War on Terror, it was unheard of to take minor excesses and seek to impugn and risk the lives of America 's soldiers, let alone to seek with a hoax to cost a wartime president the White House. And yet, prior to Rathergate, Mapes was one of CBS News' most respected producers.

(There is, however, an earlier case of the media seeking to cost a wartime president the White House with a true story – the Pentagon Papers case from 1971, involving Pentagon official Daniel Ellsberg, the Washington Post, and the New York Times during Richard Nixon's first term of office. Ellsberg broke the law, in leaking classified documents to the above-named newspapers. The same members of the SMSM who consider Ellsberg a hero for his leaks, have sought to have White House officials imprisoned for legally informing columnist Robert Novak that the wife of Nigergate fraud Joseph C. Wilson IV, Valerie Plame, is a CIA employee.)


Jailhouse Rock

You may be wondering if perhaps Mapes' misconduct was the product of an anti-Bush newsroom hysteria that gripped the socialist mainstream media (SMSM) during the 2004 campaign. After all, she couldn't possibly have been so respected at CBS News, if she had a history of dishonesty … could she?

Well. As Fox News reporter Brian Wilson revealed on September 22, Mapes had been reprimanded three years earlier by J.E. Gunja, the warden of the federal prison in Florence, CO, and stripped of her journalistic privileges regarding prisoner Peter Langan.

"In the letter, Warden J.E. Gunja spells out a scheme in which Mapes agrees to help secretly pass information between convicted white supremacist Peter Langan and another federal prisoner.

"‘Phone monitoring reveals that you agreed to this request ... This investigation was based, in part, on inmate Langan's admission to this attempt,' Gunja wrote.
"‘Your attempted misuse of the special mail privileges placed members of the public at risk,' the letter reads…."

Mapes may have seen what she did in Colorado as merely cutting a deal with the prisoners, in exchange for access. Apparently, it didn't occur to her that federal prisons are not her personal playground. And had the information that Mapes passed between Langan and the other white supremacist been part of a criminal conspiracy (like, say, murder), she would have been an accomplice. Heck, she could have been prosecuted, in any event. Had an ordinary American been guilty of the same offense, I can assure you, he'd end up in the dock.

Note that, following the same m.o. as in Colorado, Mapes gave Rathergate hoaxer Bill Burkett access to DNC flack Joe Lockhart, in exchange for Burkett's "documents."

Now, Mapes has gone too far, even for an era which has seen the mainstreaming of treason. The only way to really unearth the Rathergate story, will be for a federal prosecutor to subpoena Mapes, Burkett, Lockhart, CBS News anchor Dan Rather, CBS News chief Andrew Heyward, DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe and perhaps others, in a criminal probe. Since Mapes and Rather were involved—willingly or no—in a felony, they can no longer hide behind the First Amendment.


The Producer as News Auteur

Producers are arguably the most powerful figures in TV news magazine journalism; they decide what stories are run, and they usually research and write them. Because of their status and behind-the-scenes role, they have either not been reported on, or have been presented as heroes (e.g., former 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman in the movie, The Insider). Mary Mapes should change all of that.

In a richly informative yet succinct article in the September 27 Chicago Tribune, "The Dirty Little Secret of TV Newsmagazines," John Cook interviewed longtime TV news pros on the role of the producer on TV news magazines like CBS' 60 Minutes, ABC's 20/20 and Prime Time Live, NBC's Dateline, etc.

"'Producer' is one of the most ambiguous terms in television news,' said Mark Feldstein, a professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University and former investigative producer for NBC News and on-air reporter for CNN. ‘The dirty little secret of television newsmagazines like "60 Minutes" is that the producer is really the journalist who does all of the important editorial work. The on-air correspondents at these prime-time newsmagazines are largely front people. They parachute into the story."

News stars like Dan Rather, Mike Wallace, et al., then are essentially actors in a drama created by a producer who functions like the movie director of auteur theory who has total creative control over a picture.

"'It's really a misnomer,' said Tom Yellin, a former ABC News producer who now heads up Peter Jennings' production company. ‘You're really talking about producer-director-reporter-writer-researcher.'"

Feldstein observed that the producer conducts most of the interviews, and Cook noted that the producer will usually write the script that the "reporter" reads aloud to the audience.

Rathergate was, however, an exception to the rule. As the Wall Street Journal's John Fund wrote on October 4,

"Mr. Rather has acknowledged that he was deeply invested in the story, and when he learned Ms. Mapes had gotten the documents from Bill Burkett, a controversial former National Guard lieutenant colonel, he asked Mr. Heyward to take charge. In an interview with the New York Times, Mr. Rather quoted himself as telling Mr. Hayward [sic], ‘I have to ask you to oversee, in a hands-on way, the handling of the story.' According to Mr. Rather, ‘He got it. He immediately agreed.'"

Rather and Heyward supported the story, based on their long acquaintance with Mapes, and their respect for her professionalism and character. Let's get better acquainted with that professionalism and character.


Same as She Ever was

Mary Mapes got her start in the news business at CBS' Seattle affiliate, KIRO. One of her early stories involved a 1987 police shooting of a black drug dealer. As John Fund chronicled,

"The [Erdman] Bascomb shooting angered many people in Seattle , and officials quickly organized an inquest. Then KIRO aired an incendiary story titled ‘A Shot in the Dark,' in which a previously unknown witness named Wardell Fincher accused the cops involved in the raid of lying. He said he saw officers arrive at the house, burst in with no warning and shoot Bascomb, who might not have even known the intruders were cops. The story shifted to possible criminal wrongdoing by the police. Mr. Fincher was summoned to the inquest, and previous witnesses recalled. The reporter for the sensational segment was Mark Wrolstad, now a reporter with the Dallas Morning News. The producer was his wife, Mary Mapes.

"Fortunately for the cops, Mr. Fincher wasn't the only one at the scene of the raid that night. A reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Mike Barber, was tagging along with officers. Mr. Barber observed the officers arriving at the house, knocking, announcing themselves and then entering. He was there when the shooting happened and when the ambulances were summoned. At that point, a man 'reeking of alcohol' walked out of some nearby bushes and approached him. He wanted to know what had just happened. That was Wardell Fincher. But Mr. Fincher wasn't thoroughly checked out, so all this came out after the story aired. The police were eventually cleared but it took years and an unsuccessful civil-rights lawsuit by the Bascomb family to undo the damage.

~~~

"By that time, Ms. Mapes had left Seattle, and no one I talked with who worked at KIRO at the time can recall her being disciplined in any way for her mistake. Instead, in 1989 she was fast-tracked to the 'CBS Evening News' and later became Mr. Rather's hand-picked producer on ‘60 Minutes.' 'Maybe the National Guard mess would never have happened if she had been handled properly back then,' says one former KIRO reporter who still admires her work ethic and ability to break stories."

The admiring former KIRO reporter's attempt to find positives in Mapes' career reminds me of the rationalizations some New York Times staffers gave for the rise of Jayson Blair, because he supposedly "broke stories." Frauds like Jayson Blair and Mary Mapes don't "break" stories, they make them up.

Let's see what some bloggers had to contribute regarding Mary Mapes' professionalism and character (a tip of the hat to Michelle Malkin).

Random Nuclear Strikes

On Friday of last week, Seattle 's own John Carlson, of KVI 570 fame, got wind that Mary Mapes was involved in this latest crapfest [from] the MSM aimed at GWB.

Mapes is from the Seattle area and has worked in the local media. She worked at the same broadcasting station [KIRO] as Carlson did in the early 1990's, and Carlson shared some anecdotal stories of having to deal with Mapes as a co-worker on a day to day basis.

Let's just say that the stories weren't pretty. But they were funny.

Mapes thought of Reagan and GHWB were evil incarnate and said so on several occasions. When confronted with evidence of a mistruth spoken during a water cooler debate or pertaining to a mistake she had made in reporting a story, her usual MO was to say "oh well" and walk away.

AnalogKid at Random Nuclear Strikes:

I remember Mapes as a race baiting reporter who specialized in waiting until the local NAACP officials released a statement about police shootings and then start demanding what she called "justice" in her own special way.

Anywho, if she thought GHWB was evil incarnate, it isn't a stretch to think that she'd go anywhere or do anything to kick evil's son out of the White House...

You have to bear in mind, that there are thousands of Mary Mapeses out there, destroying people's lives for the sake of power, money, prestige, and the desire to bring down America . Every time I hear the phrase "liberal bias," my blood pressure goes up ten points. We're talking about Marxists here, folks.

Perhaps the worst indictment of Josh Howard, Dan Rather, and Andrew Heyward, is that they had confidence in, and respected Mary Mapes.


Ruthlessness ain't Always Bad

Mary Mapes is clearly a ruthless individual, and yet, unless one would shut down all news media, one must realize that merely being ruthless is not in itself a vice in the news business. In fact, it is a virtue, if you want to read and see great true stories.

The public's discontent with the media is not monolithic; it has several roots. One such root is the dominant SMSM's leftwing bias and increasing practice of fraud. Another is the related but not identical feeling that the media have contempt for the predominantly Christian folks in "flyover country" between the media subculture's landing zones in New York , Washington , DC, and Los Angeles . Though Republicans would have you believe that such contempt is limited to the SMSM, I think much of the Republican mainstream media (RMSM) is guilty of it, as well. "Flyover country" is more a mythic than a geographic notion. To media types, places like Queens and upstate New York are also "flyover country." A third, related source of discontent arises from journalists' ruthlessness in joyfully destroying the lives of ordinary people.

The problem in journalism isn't ruthlessness per se, but what kind of ruthlessness. Sources do not just appear on a journalist's doorstep every morning, dying to blow the whistle on corruption. But a journalist who can't cultivate sources, won't report many great or even good stories. And most people's complaints about the media notwithstanding, they WANT those stories. Big stories entertain readers and viewers, elevate their feelings of superiority over the "bad guys," permit them to feel pity (i.e., more feelings of superiority) for the "victims," feel fortunate ("There but for the grace of God go I"), give them something to talk about with family, friends, and colleagues, and help them make sense of the world. And smaller, blood-and-guts stories fulfill the same function, though not as powerfully, because they are usually briefer. As the TV news saying goes, "If it bleeds, it leads."

Let's look at some ruthless but honest reporters, from journalism's past.


Chicago, Chicago

In Richard Ciccone's biography of the legendary Chicago columnist, Mike Royko: A Life in Print, Ciccone tells a succinct yet vivid history of the hard-charging, hard-drinking, violently competitive tradition of Chicago newspapering that Mike Royko (1932-1997) in many ways embodied, and which may have died with him.

"Newsmen often participated in investigations rather than reporting on them. When a fugitive wanted for murder in Illinois was captured in Wisconsin , the Examiner reporter at Chicago Police Headquarters notified his desk that the cops were taking their time selecting a team to go collect the suspect. The Examiner sent its own team, which arrived at the small Wisconsin jail, flashed a few phony badges, picked up the murder suspect, returned him to a Chicago hotel, and had his interview all over page one the next day. Only then did they turn him over to police.

"When the first ‘Crime of the Century' took place in 1924, two brilliant University of Chicago students, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, were the key suspects. Police took them along the route the young victim, fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks, had walked the night he disappeared only to be found the next day bludgeoned to death, his naked body dumped near a railroad culvert. In the car with the suspects and police were two Daily News reporters, who did most of the interviewing.

"A sensational murder did not have to take place in Chicago for Chicago newsmen to scoop the world. Two of the ‘telephone' legends of American journalism worked for the Hearst papers. In 1934, Harry Reutlinger, city editor of the American, telephoned America's greatest hero, Charles Lindbergh, at his Hopewell, New Jersey, estate and became the first reporter in the country to verify that the aviator's infant son had been kidnapped and that a ransom note demanded $50,000 for his return. No one knew how Reutlinger got Lindbergh on the telephone. He may have said he was [President] Franklin Roosevelt. A few years later, Reutlinger got a big beat when he made a ship-to-shore call to the burning luxury vessel Morro Castle off the New Jersey coast. Identifying himself as the owner, he convinced a young steward to supply him with all the details of the fire and had an exclusive in print before the New York papers, which were only a few miles from the scene.

"Reutlinger posed as a policeman, a sheriff, a coroner, or anyone else who could help him get the story. His successes were remarkable, because on another floor of the Hearst Building at 326 West Madison Street was an even more practiced telephone magician, Harry Romanov, the Examiner city editor.

"Collier's Magazine named Romanov as the world's greatest telephone reporter. Once he posed as the police commissioner and got through to a hospital where several dead and injured had been taken. The man who answered the phone provided all the details Romanov asked for and then said, ‘If you will get a paper and pencil, I'll give you names, ages, addresses, and extent of injuries of all concerned.' Romanov was so astonished at the degree of cooperation he was receiving that he blurted, ‘Who is this anyway?'

"‘Police Commissioner Fitzmorris, Romy. I knew you'd be calling.'"


Is This the End of Caesar?

Any day now, the CBS News internal Rathergate report will be completed and read by the executive suits in the executive suites at CBS' "Black Rock" fortress. When Rathergate became a full-blown scandal, CBS appointed former U.S. Attorney General and liberal GOP Pennsylvania governor Dick Thornburgh, and former Associated Press chief, Louis Boccardi, to investigate the matter. When the report comes out, Mary Mapes will likely be fired.

As Rather Biased reported on December 7, in "Mapes's Last Stand,"

"Mapes has been acting very much to save her professional skin, writing up a 68-page statement in her own defense and repeatedly lobbying the commission to persuade it of her view that the documents which she obtained from a Texas Democrat with a history of mental problems could be true in spirit, if not in fact."

She's still arguing that the story is fake but true." what do detectives always say? "Criminals are creatures of habit."

To reiterate, what makes Mary Mapes bad news is not her ruthlessness, but her willingness to hype stories (Abu Ghraib) she has no business telling in the first place, and in other cases (the 1987 drug shooting, the Rathergate hoax), her willingness to spread lies, in order to harm those she hates.

And the problem with the Mary Mapeses of the world, is not limited to the phony stories they broadcast, but the countless true stories they squelch or ignore.

Dan Rather has announced that he will retire as evening news anchor on March 9, his 24th anniversary on the job as Walter Cronkite's successor; pc understudy John Roberts is his likely successor. Andrew Heyward, who will likely be fired along with Mapes, will be replaced by one of the usual suspects, possibly Jeff Fager, who vouched for Mary Mapes' character.

And now, we return to our regularly scheduled program.