My head hadn’t exploded for a while, and I thought perhaps it had built up some immunity from the detonating effects of ethics breaches that defied all reason. Then I read this in Politico:
Former White House Press Secretary Jay Carney will join CNN as a political commentator, the network announced Wednesday.
He will start Wednesday night as President Barack Obama makes a primetime statement about the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant , Sam Feist, CNN’s Washington bureau chief said in a statement.
“Jay’s unique experience as both a journalist and a White House press secretary make him an invaluable voice for the network as we cover the final two years of the Obama Administration and look ahead to the coming campaigns,” Feist said. “We’re fortunate to have Jay on our air tonight to provide analysis and insight surrounding the President’s address to the nation.”
KABOOM!
Get the squeegee and the ladder, hon—my brains are on the ceiling.
Yes, CNN is “fortunate to have Jay on our air tonight,” and more than that, the Obama Administration is so fortunate to have a partisan, loyal and formerly compensated operative placing the President’s performance in the best light possible under the guise of objective journalism.
Jay Carney, just yesterday, it seems, was a shameless paid liar for the Obama Administration. This is beyond dispute. He parsed, he spun, he was deceptive, he withheld key information to distort facts. He has forfeited any and all public trust in his statements forever, and not just in relation to the Obama Administration and Democrats. Since he has proved that he will lie for his supper, Jay Carney should not be trusted to give baseball scores, traffic reports or state that it’s raining outside. Any news organization that hires him for any purpose is spitting fat lugies in the faces of its viewers, and officially eliminating the requirement of honesty and trust from its ethics code.
But for CNN to not only hire Carney, but then to assign him the job of covering and analyzing his recent boss’s speech, and expect its audience to accept that he is suddenly, after years of doing otherwise, frequently in a shockingly dishonest fashion, capable of functioning as an independent, objective journalist rather than as a partisan mole conveniently placed in a prime news organization with that organization’s full knowledge and complicity, to slant reporting to the benefit of the Administration and the detriment of public understanding, is so blatantly insulting, irresponsible, arrogant and wrong that I’m considering not re-stuffing my brains into my skull and just stuffing rags and LEGOs up there and be done with it. How stupid do these people think we are? How stupid are we?
I can’t stand much more of this.
Just in case I decide to rejoin the land of the thinking against my better judgment, however, I’m not cleaning the ceiling until I get the last of the comments about how the mainstream news media isn’t biased, and the whole idea is a figment of Fox News’ imagination.
Ethics Alarms 
Am I to understand that the Clinton News Network has just hired the most outrageous and despicable spinmeister ever to hold the job of Presidential Press Secretary… as a commentator?? That manages to equal the spectacle of Al Jazeera hiring Baghdad Bob in the same role! I guess CNN has given up any attempt to present themselves as other than an organ of the most radical element of the leftist agenda.
Yup. (Brains still on ceiling…not capable of more.)
But Jack! Having seen the other side He’ll Surely Be Unbiased!
To guys like Carney (who hangs Soviet propaganda posters on the wall of his dining room) the only “unbiased” is full submission to the leftist cause.
That’s doubleplusungood…
Baghdad Bob was slightly less brazen than Jay Carney when telling obvious lies.
Such as his live broadcast with a team of American Apache helicopters strafing an Iraqi military formation in the background as he declared “There Are no American Forces In Iraq, We Have Defeated Them Entirely”.
At least Bob was entertaining. He could have had a wonderful career in America as an entertainer for conventions and children’s parties. His trademark “God will roast their stomachs in Hell” line (with images of the 7th Armored Cavalry kicking up dust behind him) would bring down the house every time!
Carney is no more trustworthy than BB. I think that is beyond argument, but if someone has the patience and resistance to nausea to find the Daily Kos arguments why his word was pure gold, I’d enjoy reading them.
“Am I to understand that the Clinton News Network has just hired the most outrageous and despicable spinmeister ever to hold the job of Presidential Press Secretary… as a commentator??” You got that right, Steven. Carney made many of us nostalgic for the days of Ron (“That statement is now inoperative.”) Ziegler.
CNN, the Clinton News Network. If it hired Carney to cover the NEXT president they might be on a little more solid ground. I AM a little shocked that they would do this, though, this is more an MSNBC-level act.
That’s what struck me, Steve. CNN needed to make a big move to restore the credibility that they once possessed (within limits) even 15 years ago. Instead, they headed in the direction of the other (and miserably failing) cable news channel. My only initial theory is that they are unable to psychologically cope with the prospect of copying Fox News’ success and hope to take over what’s left of MSNBC’s audience- even though it will still condemn them to the lower ranking. Maybe they think that a future leftist domination of the federal government will drive Fox out of business. Who knows? Karl may be right about the future nostalgia! They would have done better to hire some fading Hollywood type who once played an anchorman. Will Farrell, perhaps?!
Here’s where I’m torn on all this right now.
Obama and Team Bungle have royally fouled up all standards of governance, leadership and integrity for 6 years. Colossally. With Aplomb. They have arrogantly done so and eroded my trust of them to below zero.
But what if he manages to
accidentallypush a good plan. I still can’t trust it. It’s gone to far.If he were to get on stage and declare that 2 + 2 = 4, I’d immediately consult the books just to make sure. It’s sad it’s gotten that far.
Sad to the point of disaster. After the twin spectacles of Clinton and Obama, the next president will have his hands full in merely restoring some respect to the office.
Absolutely true. That’s why trust is essential to leadership, and democracy. That is why one reporter asked yesterday why anyone should bother to watch the President’s speech. He doesn’t mean what he says or stick to what he says. His promises, warnings, pledges and promises are completely unreliable. What difference, at this point, does it make?
So I take it you aren’t expecting a Churchilian rally-the-nation speech?
“We shall go on to the end. We shall fundraise in California, we shall vacation on the seas and oceans, we shall putt with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall organize our community, whatever the cost may be. We shall putt on the beaches, we shall putt on the landing grounds, we shall putt in the fields and in the streets, we shall putt in the hills; we shall never take a mulligan!”
(to be fair however, we’re not exactly facing the existential threat that bonnie ole Britain was facing)
Sir Winston would have known how to handle Obama and his gang.
Churchill was indeed a bad ass. But could he handle an American president? Even one this incompetent?
He did surrender England’s control of the oceans to America and de facto control of nearly all of it’s Western Hemisphere naval holdings to Roosevelt for the fairly indecisive Lend-Lease program…
All they really were left with in terms of real possessions was Wales and Scotland (oops…).
Churchill was no doubt the man for the moment. A great leader, a great inspirer, and a great orator (to an annoying degree at times), but even he knew that if Hitler decided to cross the channel before America was pulled *directly* into the war, England stood little to no chance of survival.
We’re also not facing an open enemy. For all we know ISIS could have slipped a few people here, a few people there, across the border with the recent flood of people and might have any number of cells ready to strike, we know not where. Being bombed by warplanes is horrible, but at least you know when they are coming, can try to hide, and can try to fight back. It also stiffens resistance to know and see the enemy. If tomorrow a bomb goes off at 8 in a train station, at 9 in a school, and at 10 in a mall, I submit that America would not stiffen, but instead cower, because you know the enemy is out there, but there’s no way to fight him on the spot and no guarantee he will be found and stopped before he hits your daughter’s school, your neighbor’s diner, or just your mom as she’s out walking her dog.
I can agree with that sentiment. One of our national weaknesses (since the closing of the frontier around 1900) is that Americans by and large have never had to live with the specter of immediate death or hazard at the hands of an enemy. We are so divorced from the reality that other cultures instinctively deal with that it will be colossal shell-shock if it happened.
I think we could snap out of it. The real question is will we be willing to take the ugly steps necessary to combat the enemy were he to appear on our soil?
We need also a growing awareness that ISIS and the jihadists aren’t the only domestic danger we’ve nurtured within our own country. A break is going to come and come soon. When it does, I fear a bloodbath that will dwarf the fratricide of the War Between the States.
I expect his objectives will go something like this:
1) Get a whole lot of disinterested nations to express concern.
2) Draft a resolution or two with no teeth.
3) Indecisively support by air the Peshmerga, the Iraqi Army and the dozen or so Sunni tribes in Anbar that are finally getting their fill of ISIS.
In the Balkans it sort of worked because the Croatians actually had a competent army and weren’t facing terrorists. This is like the Michael Collins war on speed, where the British could send in all the conventional troops and police (and a few hybrid units) they could muster, only to be shot in the back, sniped at, and bombed when they least expected it by forces that then vanished back into the countryside.
Regiments that scoffed at the best army in the world on the Western Front couldn’t pacify an area the size of New Jersey because the enemy refused to fight openly and the populace was either opposed to their continued presence or scared stiff of the IRA. Detectives and secret service officers who had outwitted the best of their German and Austrian counterparts were hoodwinked or in some cases outright assassinated because the other side had a few well-placed people in the service who kept passing them the kind of information that’s “eyes only.”
To cap it all, the UK was war-weary, and truly invading and pacifying the entire island was something it had no stomach for. You know the rest. The only difference here is that granting a free state isn’t going to produce a relative peace with only the hard-liners still fighting on (and the man who fomented it all getting his just desserts in the form of a bullet in the head), but the basis for the next war on terror.
And on top of that, the so-called “black & tans” were shellacked by the press at home and abroad as jackbooted oppressors. Sometimes they deserved it. Sometimes American cops deserve it, too. If terrorism erupts full scale in America, what will happen with, in addition to the killing, citizens are left with a distrust of law enforcement on all levels and a similar one for the military? And what of citizens who are unable to defend themselves personally because their states have virtually outlawed the purchase of firearms? This is another legacy of Obama that will come to haunt us.
The black and tans weren’t the worst of it, that honor goes to the Auxies, who used not only humiliation, pistol-whipping, and so on, but mass arson to make their point (i.e. the burning of Cork). But yes, what if it goes that far, to where trust in not just law enforcement, but government generally, is eroded to an unacceptable level?
We’re already seeing the result of this pressure as police start to go wild under the pressure of riots, media attacks and political posturing. And these are the ordinary patrol policemen. I still remember what occurred during the riots of the 1960’s. There was concurrent terrorism, too. But the Weather Underground was a collection of lunatic amateurs compared to the ones we’re liable to face before long.
“I will not rest until we end the ISIL threat. But Americans are weary of war, so boots on the ground are out of the question. And this wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t invaded Iraq. But make no mistake, we are resolute. FORE!!!”
If he says “war weary”, I’m going to scream. Americans have no concept of what war weary is. These past 13 years have not generated war weariness. What we have witnessed is gross self-loathing (thank you Leftist media and education), gross manufactured self-guilt (thank you same sources), and gross self-doubt. It needn’t be the case. But the America haters must have it so. What we grow tired of is seeing an American Peace imposed through force (so tired we won’t even see Victory the whole way through) because of those insidious maladies.
Wanna know war weary? Ask the WW2 generation, in which a vast proportion of the population was directly involved through the military and the rest were indirectly involved via taxation, rationing, and personal loss.
Ask the Civil War generation, in which 1 in every 50…that’s right 2% of the population DIED as part of the military. That doesn’t consider the ratio of those who were directly involved in combat (10% of the population) or the civilian casualties, or those indirectly affected (100%).
Nope, we have NO reason to be war-weary. What we have experienced are those 3 maladies I listed above.
Absolutely true. The “war weariness” is a political and media manufacture in order to press a domestic agenda.
Well, to be fair, we are weary. We just don’t know the source — we’re told it’s the war…
(but we shouldn’t be weary. About ANYTHING)
(except lousy politicians)
When we have politicians in power that have ties to the very people who threaten America’s security, then we damn well SHOULD be worried.
If it were possible, I’d say ask the UK people of 120 years ago, where every few years you’d hear of yet another of “Queen Victoria’s Little Wars,” but even the messy ones, like Afghanistan the first time out, Crimea, and the Boer War, didn’t break their will to keep going. I’d also say ask the people of the time between the world wars, when the West turned its back on the Russo-Polish War, the Greek and Turk war that ended with wholesale populations uprooted, the aforementioned war in Ireland and the civil war there that followed, the Soviet conquest of Armenia and the Baltics, the Finnish-Soviet war, which the Soviets only one through human wave tactics, the Spanish Civil War, which Nazi and Communist alike used as a dress rehearsal for what was next, and oh yes, the rise of a certain failed artist.
Very well said, Steve. Unfortunately, they don’t teach much history in the schools these days. What they do teach leaves little for young people to gain an honest appraisal and perspective.
Thanks. One of these days I intend to write a longer essay about the twenty years’ crisis and how the west kept putting it’s faith in the League of Nations, the Kellogg-Briand Pact that supposedly outlawed war, and the Washington Naval treaty while the Axis sneered, rebuilt its forces, and gobbled up territory.
The only good thing to be said of the Washington Naval Treaty was that, at least, America had two good fleet carriers on line instead of six otherwise useless battlecruisers when the Japanese came for us. Otherwise, it was a disaster. Criminals don’t obey the law, whether they be armed robbers or the rulers of nations. The Left has never been able to wrap its head around that concept. Certainly, that blindness is alive and well today. That’s how world wars get started.
Mostly, although the UK largely tore up blueprints whereas we sank the almost complete USS Washington. I still can’t believe there are idiot pacifists pointing back 85 years to the Kellogg-Briand pact that outlawed war and saying “but it’s the supreme law of the land that we CAN’T fight.” The pact was utopian nonsense when it was written and has been honored more in the breach than the observance, wouldn’t you say?
And the utopianists back then just accepted the claims that Germany’s panzershiffs (pocket battleships) were under 10,000 tons displacement and that Japan had no plans for super battleships mounting 18 inch guns… along with a number of other details. They’ll stick their heads in the sand every time. Then, when war DOES come, they’ll condemn soldiers and sailors to go to war with the ordnance left over from the last war and whatever innovations the military leaders can put together from what they do have available.
The point wasn’t the size of the pocket-battleships, the point was that they were specifically designed to outrun battleships and outgun cruisers, which was the kind of ship the treaty specifically contemplated prohibiting. The Yamatos were specifically concealed by massive sisal curtains and the workers threatened with severe punishment if they said a word about what was going on, but any idiot who saw the curtains had to know a very big ship was being built, and not a commercial one. Still the West did nothing, or perhaps we did it too little, too late.
Manchuria is now Manchukuo? Whatever. The Japanese strafed an American gunboat on the Yangtze? What the heck is an American gunboat doing over there in the first place? The Anschluss? Eh, the Austrians voted for it and who are we to second guess them? Give Hitler the Sudetenland, I think that should be it and we will have peace for our time. What? You say he wants Poland too?
Hippy: “We ought to just outlaw war man”
Me: “How you gonna enforce such a ban?”
Hippy: “I donno we’ll do something about man”
Me: “Like maybe have a group a nations…”
Hippy: “Yeah man…”
Me: “…who gather together against the offending nation…”
Hippy: “Yeah man, you’re feeling my groove”
Me: “…and prosecute a War against the offending nation to put a stop to them.”
Hippy: “Hell yeah man that way we can outlaw War…hey wait a minute I see what you did there. I’m going to go take a shower now and get a job.”
What that hippie would have actually said was, “Hey man, you’re just a tool of the establishment. I gotta go smoke a joint and groove to Iron Butterfly!”. That, plus a few obscenities. I knew those guys!
But I wanted the hippy in my hypothetical to be reformed!
Most did reform… after a few decades of reality hitting them relentlessly in the face! The current crop of dope smoking wannabes won’t have that luxury.
“What difference, at this point, does it make?”
Hillary? Is that you?
Not a smidgen of a conflict of interest there, where CNN hires the most recently departed White House Press Secretary to cover the speech by the president who employeed that person. Not a smidgen of reason not to trust Jay Carney, then or now. Not a smidgen of sarcasm in this comment.
Former White House Press Secretary Jay Carney will join CNN as a political commentator, the network announced Wednesday.
**************
Sock Puppet Carney ?
I wonder if he’ll still be angry.
No boots on the ground but we are sending advisors…
I suppose those advisors will wear tennis shoes.
This is an attempt to win a war without fighting one, nothing more.
(Full Disclosure: I didn’t watch his speech)
My only information on it until I get around to watching it are quoted bits I’ve read on Twitter or News Sites…
That’s ok, I bet Jack did (or at least read the transcript), and will duly analyze same.
Nope. Fool me two hundred and thirty-four times, shame on me. Obama has proved beyond a reasonable doubt that he views speeches as the equivalent of action, and subsequent real actions unrelated to what he promises in speeches. What he says only matters if you believe it, and it you believe it, you are hopeless.
Actually that’s a pretty good, if short analysis. How about the ethics of national weakness? Or maybe I’ll just put together the essay I had in mind and you can comment if so inclined.
As long as Obama is the President, national weakness is a steady state, presumed, and undeniable. He doesn’t believe in national strength, that’s all. He’ll give lip service to it, but his actions are all in the opposite direction.
And yes, it is unethical for the United States of America to be passive and weak. The public understand that at one level, which is why it doesn’t like Obama’s foreign policy, though it will keep saying that it also doesn’t want troops actually fighting anywhere. This is why, theoretically, you want to elect competent leaders who know when the public doesn’t know its ass from its elbow.
Competent is good, but an additional component is leaders who are brave enough to tell the public the truth, and erudite enough to make it understand. Not that the president needs to be a slick PR man who can tell you to go to Hell and have you looking forward to the trip, but in your example he needs to be able to say “I understand that you don’t want troops in danger. No one wants that less than I do except the troops themselves, although they know what they signed on for, as do I. I believe we all also agree that being weak in fact and in the eyes of the world is not in this nation’s best interests. It is unfortunately not possible to have it both ways. To do this by a halfway measure is worse than doing nothing at all, and doing nothing at all is not in this nation’s best interests. Therefore I must regrettably announce the deployment…”
I understand your sentiment but I can’t agree with that content.
Having to explain why showing weakness is a bad thing is, I think, just another way of showing weakness. It also implies that any decision to take military action has as a primary objective “to show we are strong” as opposed to a legitimate objective like “killing Al Baghdadi” or “liberating besieged cities”…
I should clarify: strong good people don’t explain why it’s good to be strong… they just use their strength for good objectives and explain the good objective. So as long as one has to dither about not being weak, they probably are weak.
Sending advisors… isn’t that exactly how we started in Vietnam? I’ve seen Obama compared disfavorably to Carter, but maybe Truman is a better comparison.
That should have been unfavorably…
Yeah, but Truman was willing to lay waste via overwhelming destruction to the core of an enemy culture with the intent to bring that entire society to utter submission.
Weak knees Obama wouldn’t.
Truman was willing to possibly use nuclear weapons in SE Asia. Eisenhower kept the number of advisors to 900 and decided not to ratchet up, believing the potential losses outweighed any positives. For a former general, Eisenhower, who ended the Korean War, pulled the rug out from under the UK, France, and Israel in the Suez, and just shrugged as the Soviets rolled over free Hungary, was not very robust in his foreign policy, or maybe he didn’t think any of these were worth fighting over as long as he kept the homeland safe.
Note: Boy, Jay sure sounded objective in his debate with McCain last night. CNN should have fired him on the spot. That’s advocacy, not journalism.
You hoped for too much. CNN should just merge with MSNBC.
Which, ironically, would result in a network with lower ratings than either has now.
I saw statistics yesterday that indicate that Fox’s daytime news shows are more heavily viewed than CNN’s prime time lineup. When you see that, you’d think that CNN would be considering a major course change in order to be competitive. Instead, they’re intensifying the very course that dropped them out of the top spot and spiralled them down into competing with MSNBC for the cellar dweller. That would be the equivalent of Obama being lambasted for playing golf during a crisis and then going back again with another crisis. Oh, wait…!
It’s not about the ratings, it’s about the liberalism.
Yup.
As long as they can characterize Fox viewers as idiots lapping up what they want to hear, they are safe.