A Time Not to Lie Down While They Lie – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

The tragedy of the national mainstream media is that they collude to corrupt souls. They corrupt our society. They corrupt our children. They corrupt our culture.

For a decade, I have been getting the daily news email from both the Washington Post and the New York Times. I need to read what the opposition has to say, partly to enlighten and expose myself to others’ ideas and broaden my horizons, and importantly, to know what evil they are up to. They truly are evil.

Somehow, each runs the same stories as the other one does every day. Certainly, each outlet properly will run the same obvious stories: a war breaks out, tariffs are imposed, an Obama judge issues a nationwide injunction to stop a Trump executive order. That is a legitimate part of the day’s news (although it’s not exactly “news” when the ACLU runs to an Obama judge in some rainforest and gets him/her/them/it to issue a nationwide injunction against Trump impacting New York, California, Illinois, Texas — the whole country. But it is the latest event in the past 24 hours, so it belongs in the paper.) (RELATED: Dictatorship of Obama Judges)

However, the hokey thing is that, somehow, every day they also both run the same story that day on some new delicious food or an interview with some celebrity who now cooks his own broccoli or a sudden exploration into the ways that plastic ruins new operatic compositions. That is, some story that has nothing to do with anything (as my Zaydie grandfather would say: “gornisht fuhn gornisht”). How do they both come out with the same miscellaneous stories every day?

Or the same “takes” on the major stories. Pursuing the same “angles.” Interviewing the same minor figures.

I read carefully. I love English and all its insanity. (Swim/swam. Drive/ drove. Hit/hit. Lie/lay. Lay/laid. Can/may.) My late and forever-beloved wife, Ellen of blessed memory, and I (not me) would hurl abuse at our TV screen every time a grammatical error burst forth. “Hi, Honey. It’s me.” Out would come our blasts: “It’s ‘I,’ you schmendrick! I. I!  Not ‘me,’ you Cookie Monster.”  (The word “is” in that sentence is an intransitive verb; therefore, the person is not an object or the predicate but the nominative, a noun: I.)

Such a beautiful, harsh-sounding language, subjected to abuses by all. When interstitial lung disease almost killed me, and I spent four months in a world-class hospital, by G-d’s grace, being prepared for a lung transplant, undergoing it, and rehabilitating from the experience, I was subjected mercilessly to the misuse of the verb for reclining. “Can you please lay down?”

The word is “lie,” not “lay.” That verb gets misused within my orbit ten times daily. At doctor’s offices: “Please lay down [on the waxy deli paper], and the doctor will be in soon.” Lay down? I am tempted to retort: “What should I lay down?” But I do not. The nurse won’t grasp. She is focused exclusively on putting that thing on my outstretched right index finger and strapping on that blood pressure cuff that, no matter the brand, spends five minutes gyrating with the craziest numbers reflecting oncoming death (210/30), and then she says, “It’s 120/80. Good numbers. Now you can lay down.”)

I rant because I care about words. Therefore, I read the daily news reports in the Washington Post and New York Times carefully. Those media (“media” is plural) lie plenty when they shouldn’t. I focus on adjectives. That’s where most of the lies take place: in the adjectives, adverbs, and whatever else they got.

Every WaPo and NYT story with a political overlay (not overlie) is replete with biased descriptors. Those subtle adjectives color the entire account. If they cannot lie outright, they couch and subtly mislead. Obama judges are “brilliant, warm, authoritative.” Trump judges are “in over their heads,” “unsure,” “inexperienced.”

When a federal district court judge dictatorially pulverizes a Trump executive order with a nationwide injunction, the article often names the judge but not who appointed him/her/them/it. Thus, we do not immediately glean the source of the bias nor realize the dubiousness of the ruling. By contrast, when a judge hands down a conservative ruling, the article includes the information: “Judge Jones, a Reagan-Bush-Trump appointee…”  This media practice is especially insidious in articles reporting a federal appellate opinion. If the appellate panel knocks down a Trump executive order by a vote of 2-1, with two Obama judges outvoting a Reagan judge, the headline is “Eighth [or whatever ordinal number] Circuit Declares Trump Defied Law.” The whole circuit — or only the two Obama Judges? Yes, the panel speaks for the circuit, but the nuance is important as we anticipate an appeal higher. For all we know, the majority of that circuit would vote the other way, but the luck of the draw put two Obama judges on that three-judge panel. Sometimes, a really questionable lopsided panel decision leaves enough uncertainty that the entire circuit decides, “Let’s hear this appeal again, but this time all of us en banc.” And then the 2-1 ends up at 9-6 the other way because the non-Obama judges get in, too.

This is striking in redistricting opinions. You read that a “Federal Panel Ends a Century of Racism.” In fact, a panel with two Obama judges among the three, in a circuit with some 20 judges, have voted to uphold a new voting map drawn up by some Democrats named by the Democrat governor of the state. When it ultimately reaches the Supreme Court, where the judicial balance differs, the new map finally gets thrown out.

Even the way words and names are juggled for political bias: The Washington Post and New York Times use “West Bank,” a term that has all but disappeared in Israel, where the more accurate “Judea and Samaria” are now commonly used. They speak of “settlers” living in “settlements” when the correct terms are “people” living in “communities.” Imagine routinely describing the 2.3 million “settlers” living in the Houston “settlement” or the 2.7 million “settlers” living in the “settlement” of Chicago.

Just this week, “special” elections were held in the United States, primarily for a state supreme court seat in Wisconsin and for two Congressional seats in Florida. We deduce for whom the Washington Post and New York Times were rooting. (It would have sounded better if that prior sentence ended with the preposition, but I am a stickler for the archaic.) I look at the next day’s headlines, and the media are in an orgiastic delirium that the Democrat won the special election in Wisconsin. They barely even noted that the GOP took the two House seats, and they listed that story lower on the day’s headlines. As a queen is more valuable than a knight (horsey) in chess, two House seats are more valuable than a Wisconsin court seat, important though the latter is, too. They both came out identically: Each Republican candidate beat the Democrat by 15 points — FIFTEEN! — yet, both papers’ stories focused instead on how the prior November elections had seen the Republicans win those seats by 30 or so.

The take-away: The voters turned on Trump. No consideration that the voters were presented this time with brand-new candidates aiming to succeed their long-time past favorites, yet voted GOP by 15 points anyway. No focus on how remarkable a 15-point win is when considered in the context that one of the losers spent 10 times more on his losing Democrat campaign than the victorious Republican did. No emphasis that this was a quirky “special” election to replace congressmen who had been named to the Trump cabinet, rather than a classic party primary or a November election. Instead, one identical takeaway: The Republicans are in big trouble, and the tide is turning against Trump, because both his Congressional candidates won, each by “only” 15 points.

If it were not for four years of Biden and Harris, media bias would be even worse. However, Biden–Harris is the gift that keeps giving. After ignoring Biden’s mental decline and Harris’s mental vacuity for four years, the media can no longer collude this round on 25th Amendment stories for Trump. After Biden mass-pardoned or commuted virtually every federally convicted murderer in America — until his auto-pen ran out of ink — the media were left paralyzed when Trump let all the January 6 victims out of the Merrick Garland–Liz Cheney Bastille. After Biden let 10 million illegals in, even liberals secretly cheer as Trump and Tom Homan throw them out, legally or illegally, and the meaner, the better — like that insane El Salvador dungeon.

The left-wing media mislead, falsify, lie, and employ subtle tactics and tricks to fool people, play with their heads, take advantage of human weaknesses, and corrupt a society. Instead of telling the public what it means to change a person’s sex — e.g. to cut off a boy’s or man’s main frontal reproductive organ or to cut off a woman’s breasts and disfigure that person for life while also subjecting them to a lifetime of severely challenging steroids and many really tough medications — they call it “gender-affirming care.” Where did that come from? How did they all come up with that one at the same time?

How do they all come up with the same spin on each story each day? When Federal District Judge Aileen Cannon was ruling in Trump’s favor in the Florida documents case, they all came up with the identical theme that Judge Cannon was “in over her head” and should recuse. They all found the exact same bitter left-wing state court judge, who never got to be a federal judge, to quote as to how stupid she is. In fact, she graduated magna cum laude, and a member of the Order of the Coif, from top-10-rated Universty of Michigan Law School.

As conservatives who slept while the Left took control of the mainstream media, including all the main television networks and newspapers, we have a chance, if we stay awake this time, with online outlets like this one, social media, podcasts, and other new ways to reach the “undecided.” They always will lie. For us, it is a time when we must not lie down.

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Watch Rav Fischer’s latest 10-minute messages: (i) “There is No Palestine” (here); and (ii) 6 Divine Miracles by Which Trump Defeated Harris (here)

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