Musings on the Double Standards of the MSM.

Of course sexual harassment is real. Powerful people who dangle the carrot of career advancement in trade for sexual favors are scum. It’s even more brutal when some are made to feel “You’ll go nowhere unless…”  There is also plenty of mid-level and lower-level sexual misconduct. So it is real, and happens every day all over the globe. The victims are mainly women. But there are also extortionists, opportunists, gold diggers and groupies. They are not victims. That said, it seems like everyone in the main stream media is jumping over one another to be the first report “sexual misconduct” allegations against any TV personality or otherwise famous person. Something is fishy. Perhaps it’s the stench of rotten hypocrisy, for this was the same left wing media that back in the day tried to suppress allegations against their man in the Whitehouse, Bill Clinton, aka. “Slick Willie.” OK, it may not be exactly the same media, but close enough. It’s less about individuals than it is about a pervasive ideology. The media groupthink is popping up again and manifesting itself in the latest mutation.

Clinton paula jones

President Clinton, Paula Jones, ca. 1998.

Those who have been following the double standards of the left have seen this dishonesty going on for decades. It’s why many of us don’t trust the main stream media. If something impedes their left-wing agenda (think any rascally Republican person or policy) it is portrayed as bad or inexcusable. If something helps advance their liberal goals (think president Clinton in 1998) it is portrayed as good, defendable. Right, wrong do not really matter when one distills it down. Bill Clinton IS the poster child for this double standard.

If they do decide to finally throw the Bill Clinton under the bus for “sexual misconduct” it will not truly be done on the basis of a moral failing or a lack of virtue, for those concepts do not exist in the liberal atheist’s mind.* Besides, it’s too late for that. It will be done because Hillary lost and it has been decided that she should be “retired.” Senator Al Frankenstein may yet still survive. After all, one should not hold a former SNL comic to very high standards. Once a buffoon always a buffoon. Their fate depends on what is decided behind locked doors in the newsrooms. Who is expendable and who is not. But there are Young Turks (of the female persuasion) in those newsrooms now. They will increasingly have influence.

Though pretty soon, there will be few remaining to accuse. It’s a bit much, I think. However, anything that causes this kind of twisting and squirming among the liberal ranks and reveals their hypocrisy is amusing to watch.

As a result of this media tempest, perhaps inappropriate romantic flings will become a relic of the past, perhaps not. In the future perhaps permission to “make a pass” will have to be done in the presence of witnesses. Wordy contracts will have to be signed prior to the commencement of any affair. So much for spontaneity.  New academic departments will be established at public Universities to explore what constitutes a “proper advance” towards the opposite sex. Perhaps sexual edicts will be added to the Code of Federal Regulations by the next Democrat-controlled Congress. Senator John Conyers – should be the chairman of the committee, Al Frankenstein his co-chair. 

*I never once believed Bill Clinton should have been impeached for sexual misconduct. There were simply too many other reasons why he could have been convicted for real high crimes, like accepting Chinese money for his presidential campaign, and then allowing the transfer of missile technology to, guess who… the Chinese.

 

Frotho

Nat Hentoff – A Great American

By Frotho Canutus

Nat Hentoff, an American writer, historian and jazz critic died on Saturday at 91. I admired Mr. Hentoff for three reasons, his love of American Jazz, his reverence for the American Constitution and his intellectual independency. I considered Mr. Hentoff somewhat liberal,* but he was never one to tow a party line. If he disagreed with certain generally accepted positions of either party, he spoke out against them. He was honest. Unlike many pundits, he did not operate using double standards.

Here are some things Mr. Hentoff wrote or said over the years.

On his decision to leave Harvard:

bechet-in-france-reduced

Sidney Bechet playing in Paris, France, 1950’s. Bechet, along with Louis Armstrong were two, pioneering, master soloists of early jazz.

“Sidney Bechet was playing at the Savoy Cafe that night, so I closed my books and went down there to hear him. That marked the end of my Harvard ambition. I decided there and then that I had to have a day job that involved writing about jazz.”

On Jazz:

” I consider jazz a life force.”

“I sometimes imagine what my life would have been like if it weren’t for jazz. Once you get into it, you can never get enough of it. I’ll leave you with this—every once in a while writing about my day job I get so down I have to stop. I literally stop and put on a recording, and then that sound, that feeling, that passion for life gets me up and shouting again and I can go back to grim stuff of what’s happening in the rest of the world.”

billie-holiday-sound-of-jazz

Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins and Gerry Mulligan recording “The Sound of Jazz.” Nat Hentoff was at this amazing session.

On Billie Holiday:

“After it was all over, she was so pleased with how it went — it was live, by the way — she came over and kissed me. And that’s worth more to me than the Congressional Medal of Honor.”

On Charles Mingus:

“Every so often I’d be sitting at my desk, and at about 10 a.m. or so my phone would ring. When I’d answer, I’d hear some music. Well I knew whose music it was. Mingus had that signature sound that you could dig right away. After about 10 minutes, Mingus would come on and ask, ‘I just taped this. What do you think of it?’ What a privilege that was. It was like Beethoven calling to ask, ‘What did you think about my sonata?'”

On President Obama:

NH: “I try to avoid hyperbole, but I think Obama is possibly the most dangerous and destructive president we have ever had….I am beginning to think that this guy is a phony. Obama seems to have no firm principles that I can discern that he will adhere to. His only principle is his own aggrandizement. This is a very dangerous mindset for a president to have.”

John Whitehead: Do you consider Obama to be worse than George W. Bush?

NH: “Oh, much worse….Obama is a bad man in terms of the Constitution. The irony is that Obama was a law professor at the University of Chicago. He would, most of all, know that what he is doing weakens the Constitution.”

On the “free exercise” of religion (First Amendment) and the ACLU:

“The ACLU sees the separation of church and state as so absolute that not a single religious word must be allowed to pass a schoolhouse door.”

On Obama and Abortion:

“One of the worst elements of Obama’s career, which no one talks about, is that he voted twice for a bill that said, if there is a botched abortion, if the child emerges from the womb alive, it should be okay to kill the baby. We have elected a president – twice! – who agrees with infanticide.”

“As Harry Blackmun said when he wrote Roe v. Wade, `Once a child is born, the child has basic constitutional rights: due process, equal protection of the laws.'”

On Bill Clinton:

“I think one thing we share [with my wife] is a complete bottomless disdain for Bill Clinton.”

Rest in peace Mr. Hentoff. If by chance you were wrong about heaven, I hope you are reunited with many of your old jazz friends like Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus, Coltrane, Paul Desmond and others.

*Nat Hentoff once characterized himself as “a Jewish, atheist, civil libertarian, left-wing pro-lifer.”

In a 2009 interview with Marc Meyers, Hentoff refers to himself as a “libertarian.”

Sources:

http://www.jazzwax.com/2009/05/interview-nat-hentoff-part-1.html

http://riverwalkjazz.stanford.edu/program/jazz-band-ball-interview-jazz-journalist-nat-hentoff