Chris Cillizza alternately writes the obvious as if it is a new revelation, follows the mainstream media’s pro-Left lockstep, He now in in the opinion for profit business, unlike me, who is in the opinion for free business, and yes, I realize that this places my criticism of Cillizza’s acumen on shaky ground immediately.
He recently wrote a substack essay (his newsletter is called “Chris Crucial”….no, I’m not kidding) titled “What does Kamala Harris *actually* believe?” criticized the “She Isn’t What She Is” candidate for so flagrantly flip-flopping to pander to voters who might be inclined to oppose a radical progressive, which is what she had been literally up to this moment. The essay concludes,
“Harris staked out all of her more liberal policy positions when she thought that the path to the 2020 Democratic nomination would be to portray herself as a more electable Bernie Sanders. Now that she is the Democratic nominee, she is walking away from them because she needs to appeal to the electoral middle. I get it! But it also makes me wonder — and should make you wonder too — whether she actually believes in any sort of specific policies. Or whether everything is negotiable based on her political circumstances.”
Hasn’t anyone not in thrall to the Democratic Party no matter who or what it nominates figure that out about Harris? And yet this unremarkable analysis unleashed the whirlwind on poor Chris, resulting in that declaration of independence above. I have written almost the identical sentiments as each of Cillizza’s points on Ethics Alarms, usually in comments, some of the many times. The problem is that Cillizza is hack as well as an idiot. I wrote about him in one post,
“….journalists, as a group, just aren’t that sharp. There are exceptions, but they are exceptions: this is a field that has never attracted the best and the brightest, and it is a structural problem that has become a major problem in the age of the “new journalism,” which is advocacy journalism, as in unethical journalism. The people with the largest metaphorical megaphone lack the wisdom, acumen, education of critical thinking skills to justify their having it. Yet they really think they know best, and have the right and the duty to use a job that was supposed to be about informing the public to manipulate public opinion for what journalists think is “the greater good.” They don’t know what the greater good is. Most don’t know what “good” is.
Chris Cillizza isn’t just any journalist: he’s supposed to be one of the better ones. Horrible thought: he probably is. He’s an editor at CNN, and before that he wrote the daily political blog of The Washington Post, and was a regular writer for the Post on political issues as well as a frequent panelist on “Meet the Press.” He also has a long rap sheet on Ethics Alarms, despite the fact that I avoid following his regular forays into fake news, propaganda, and biased punditry. Who knows what I’ve missed.
What I haven’t missed is plenty, though. In a 2019 post, for example, Cillizza wrote that Secretary of State William Seward’s purchase of Alaska from Russia “didn’t work out too well,” which is why it is called “Seward’s Folly.” When I finished taping my skull back together, I wrote,
It is astounding that Cillizza could write this, and that CNN could allow it to be published. Never mind that Alaska has the largest oil field in North America. In Harvard historian Oscar Handlin’s book,”Chance Or Destiny: Turning Points In American History,” the purchase of Alaska is #5 out of ten. Written during the Cold War (I have an old copy of it right here, because unlike Chris Cillizza, I know something about American history, ’cause I read and stuff…), the book explains that had it not been for Seward’s prescient purchase, “the bases that today flank the northern ocean would not have been American, pointing toward Asia, but Russian, pointing toward the United States. If our citizens, in the air age, still feel that distance from the potential enemy gives some security to their national borders, it is in no small measure due to Mr. Seward’s bargain.”.
That’s right, bargain. Alaska’s location is now considered critical protection for the continental United States, and has been for about a hundred years. The state is uniquely positioned for supporting space surveillance and satellite control networks, tracking thousands of orbital objects on a daily basis, and providing access to refueling tankers and the Greenland ice sheet.
Did it ever occur to Cillizza to do a little research regarding Alaska, since he obvious knows less than nothing about it (knowing what isn’t true is less than nothing)? Nah. Nobody checks facts at CNN anyway.
Saying that the Alaska purchase is known today as “Seward’s Folly” is like saying that the sun never sets on the British Empire, or that Babe Ruth holds the career home run record. Try to keep up, Chris: the name “Seward’s Folly”—cartoonists drew Alaska as a worthless and uninhabitable iceberg, which is what most Americans, who were like Chris, though they had an excuse, it being the 19th Century and all—- was officially retired in 1896. That was when the Klondike Gold Rush brought over100,000 prospectors to Alaska , creating “boom towns,” businesses, and eventually, a new state.
The man is an idiot. In another infamous post, Cillizza put his name on a story headlined, “The New Sneaky Issue in the 2022 Election.” The “new issue”? Illegal immigration. In 2020, Cillizza claimed that President Trump’s use of the word “riots” to describe Black Lives Matter riots was racist. The Cillizza EA dossier is full of either throbbing progressive, anti-Trump bias, or disqualifying outbreaks of journalism malpractice, and yet there he is, sounding just like me.
Where’s a wood-chipper when you need one?
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