Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

I was a newspaper guy—reporter and editor—for 40-some years. (Yeah, scary.)

My attitude was, “Tell me your sacred cows— the stuff you don’t want me to write about. Because that’s what I ’m gonna write about.

Not supposed to look into the real health benefits of marijuana, because it might “encourage kids to try drugs”? You ’ve already got them on all kinds of patented pharmaceuticals, including psychiatric drugs, that are probably much more dangerous. So I ’ll write about the health benefits of marijuana, and the way Prohibition only makes things worse, like when alcohol Prohibition turned us from a peaceful nation of wine and beer drinkers into a crazed culture going blind on bathtub gin while the distributors shot each other down with Tommy-guns in the streets.

Don’t want me to write about how counterproductive it was to send unwilling draftees to fight a “sort of, limited” war in the jungles of mainland Asia, “Take that hill so we can give it back tomorrow”? Thanks; I’ll get right on it.

What happened to that instinct to go find the story that the “powers that be” wanted buried? Yeah, I know how the Internet has slashed into the paid-advertising model that supported “objective ” daily newspapers. But don’t you think the ongoing loss of audience and credibility of the “legacy media” might also have something to do with the fact their little drones now all recite the “ Leftist line” in unison—never challenge any of the sacred cows?

That what remains of the American and European “news media” would become captive to the screeching Collectivist/Globalist Left was predictable. First our colleges and now even the government youth propaganda camps (“public high schools”) have been captive to unionized Leftists pushing a thinly disguised Marxist agenda—Franz Fanon, Noam Chomsky and the like—for 45 years now. Public schools which quite purposely turn out graduates who are just barely literate enough to follow their marching orders, by the way, with most of a troublemaker’s innate sense of curiosity long since ground out of them.

(Real research is such a grind. We SO much more prefer the classes where we get good grades for just shouting our opinions about racism and oppression and stuff. And now we even get a free field trip to the state Capitol to shout it out for gun control! … even though we wouldn’t know a muzzle brake from a stripper clip, and couldn’t tell you who wrote the Bill of Rights or why he (or they) believed a citizenry armed with military-grade weapons is somehow “necessary to the security of a free state.” … Or even where that phrase appears.)

With the exception of a few pretty network news readers with great hair, no one ever went into journalism for the money. The sense since Woodward and Bernstein took down Richard Nixon was that journalists had a mission to take down greedy white “deplorable” politicians (and if we can’t find any, we’ll invent some. “If you’re for enforcing the existing immigration laws like every other nation on earth, you’re a racist!”)

The problem is not just a political “leaning.” The problem is that today’s crop of journalists are so incurious it never occurs to them to notice that their assignment editors are taking orders from owners and publishers who are on the same globalist/mind-control team as virtually all of those bought-and-paid-for politicians they’re supposed to be “exposing.” The big corporate guys don’t really care which politicians get taken down, since they’ve bought the “D”s AND the “R”s—they own Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi AND Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham and Trey Gowdy. It’ s Kabuki, it’s a Punch-and-Judy show to make people feel they’ve got a real choice.

After all, the 2016 election was supposed to be between the harridan of the Clinton Crime Family, and the Younger Brother of the Bush Crime Family, right? Between the Tattaglias and the Barzinis, basically. Which one was going to do what Wall Street and George Soros and the Saudis bribed them to do? Duh.

What disgusts me so much is not just that virtually everyone in the “legitimate, mainstream news business” is now a well-trained Marxist, all reading from the same list of talking points disguised as “questions.” It’s that they just don’t show any damned curiosity.

You really need just two things to be a reporter. OK, it helps to be able to organize your thoughts and write the facts in descending order of importance in a hurry in crisp, clear sentences. But the two things you really need are curiosity, which should be inborn, and a second thing, which takes some discipline and training, because it goes AGAINST the politeness that our mothers taught us.

The second thing you need is to not be afraid—to boldly demonstrate that you have no fear whatsoever—of being taken for an idiot or an a-hole.

I was a newsman—reporter or editor—for 40 years. Many’s the time I called the “public relations director” of some government agency. “Is it true,” I’d ask, that your boss, the director of the agency, said or did this really dumb, outrageous thing yesterday?

Many’s the time I’d hear, “Now Vin, have you been talking to those black helicopter conspiracy nuts again? Does that sound to you like something the director would say and do?”

They’re good at this. Did you want to confess to being some kind of black-helicopter conspiracy nut? You’re not likely to get invited out with the rest of the gang for beers on Friday night, not likely to get to spend time with the prettier gals in the newsroom, if you get THAT reputation. Easier to chuckle and say, “Yeah, Tom, I guess you’re right.”

But a real reporter doesn’t give a damn about being thought of a “nice guy.” He says, “It’s interesting, Tom, but in those two rhetorical questions you just asked me, I didn’t hear the word ‘Yes’ or the word ‘No.’ So, again, yesterday afternoon at 4 p.m., did your boss say and do that stupid thing?”

“Well, Vin, I don’t really know. I’ll have to check.”

“I’d appreciate it, Tom. And when you don’t know, Tom, maybe in future you should just f-ing TELL me you don’t know, what do you think? “

But the current gang doesn’t even ask the most obvious, staring-in-your-face questions. Just as examples, off the top of my head, here are five:

1) HILLARY’S HEALTH

Twenty months ago, in the fall of 2016—despite the fact she didn’t seem to have the stamina to do more than a couple of public appearances per week, when Donald Trump was out speaking to cheering throngs of 30,000 people three times a DAY, often going till 1 in the morning—Hillary Clinton and her doctors insisted she was in perfectly fine health to stand up to the rigors of serving in the most daunting office in the world—the Presidency of the United States—for a full four years.

Since then, this woman—who has no job, who’s free to set her own leisurely pace—has broken her toe, broken or sprained her wrist, fallen down a flight of stairs in India (aides at either arm caught her, as usual), and is now seen out in public on hot summer days wearing a weird get-up consisting of a long heavy coat with a decorative scarf draped around her shoulders, obviously concealing some kind of sturdy metal back brace, something out of Skeletor in the comic books.

I’m surprised they don’t have her creeping around with a four-legged walker, wearing a bicycle helmet.

Yet you’ll remember back when Hillary collapsed and had to be thrown bodily into her van at the World Trade Center memorial observances in Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2016, she and her doctor claimed she had “pneumonia”—“pneumonia” which was curiously all better when she emerged from her daughter’s apartment to greet the gathered folk out on the sidewalk about an hour later.

Doctors report someone who has pneumonia so severe as to cause a complete fainting collapse do not “get all better” within an hour.

Also, Donald Trump (who—contrary to most reporting—often initially says a lot less than he really knows) commented that Hillary would show up for the presidential debates all buzzing with energy, but less than two hours later would need help shuffling into her van—kind of like someone who was being “juiced up” for special occasions.

 

Yet reporters—whose first job is to be curious—shrieked that it was (and apparently remains, to this day) completely out-of-line to challenge the “official version” on Hillary’ s health, that only black helicopter Conspiracy Nuts would visit the Vidzette Web site and listen to Dr. Ted Noel explain that Hillary Clinton was showing every sign of the mood-and energy-swings of a patient on L-Dopa therapy (which can create a high like cocaine, followed by a serious slump) for advanced Parkinson’s Disease.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhacgZQcmWs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzKIM1SR_Po

Still not curious? Still not willing to risk being ostracized from the gang that goes out for beers on Friday night because you’ve started asking whether Hillary and her doctor lied about her physical fitness for office? Not even upset about being lied to?

After all, Parkinson’s is not just a neural, but also a neuro-PSYCHIATRIC disorder; it can affect judgment, mood, and reasoning. Yet you did everything you could (from one-sided coverage, to slipping her the debate questions in advance) to rig the presidential election to PUT THIS DAME IN CHARGE.

What about her drinking? The DNC emails—shipped to Wikileaks by Seth Rich, who paid the price—reveal staffers asking (I paraphrase) “If I’m supposed to go over at dinner time to ask Hillary about this, who’s going to sober her up?” It’s widely reported the reason she wouldn’t give a concession speech on election night—as well as offering a few comforting words of thanks to her supporters—is that she was blind, screeching drunk. And what about the night that the rescue mission in Italy was waiting for her go-ahead to go rescue Ambassador Stevens in Benghazi? Drunk? In an L-Dopa “down cycle” coma?

A good choice to have her “finger on the button” of nuclear war?

Maybe there should be a legal requirement that all presidential candidates still in the race at that point undergo a thorough physical exam administered by a panel of INDEPENDENT physicians in early May, six months before our presidential elections—with public reporting of any debilitating disease encountered.

(It might have ruled out that partial fourth term for the fast-failing FDR. And did the voters really not have a right to know John F. Kennedy suffered from colitis, prostatitis, and Addison’s disease, which affects the body’s ability to regulate blood sugar? That he also had osteoporosis of the lower back from a war injury, causing pain so severe that he was unable to perform simple tasks such as pulling the shoe and sock onto his left foot? That to fight the pain, Kennedy took as many as 12 medications at once, including codeine, Demerol and methadone for pain; Ritalin, a stimulant; meprobamate and librium for anxiety; barbiturates for sleep; thyroid hormone; and injections of a blood derivative, gamma globulin, to combats infections? (all per presidential historian Robert Dallek of Boston University, in his Kennedy book “An Unfinished Life.”) That during the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, and the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, Kennedy was taking steroids for his Addison’s disease, painkillers for his back, anti-spasmodics for his colitis, antibiotics for urinary tract infections, antihistamines for his allergies, and on at least one occasion, an anti-psychotic drug to treat a severe mood change that Jackie Kennedy believed was brought on by the antihistamines? Mind you, he stood up to all this pretty well. Still: No concerns? The voters had no right to know?)

But who’s going to push for such a mandatory medical exam, if reporters aren’t curious (and moderately courageous) enough to push back against “No one is allowed to challenge Hillary’s health. What are you, a right-wing conspiracy nut?”

2) THE OCTOBER BIMBO PARADE

In October of 2016, in what Hillary Clinton figured would be the death blow to the Donald Trump presidential campaign, Hillary’s people brought forward half-a-dozen women who claimed that—some time between seven and 22 years previous—Donald Trump had bumped them, touched them, or groped them.

From the very beginning, there was something very weird about this parade of aging, puzzlingly butch, supposedly outraged feminists.

First, no newspaper I worked for in the past 40 years would have run ANY of these women’s accounts in the closing weeks of a political campaign, when the accused would obviously be short of time and resources to marshal a defense. The first thing we would have asked was: “Did you file a police report at the time? Can we see a copy? Do you have any court documents—including affidavits sworn under penalty of perjury, both by yourself and by witnesses—to back up your claims? No? How does it come that you bring this forward only now, years later, in the closing weeks of a national election campaign? Especially against a rich guy, whose lawyers might have been expected to at least buy your silence, years ago, in which case there’d be some kind of paper trail?”

Breaking news often slows down in the summer. All KINDS of assignment editors should now be instructing their eager young reporters: “Go talk to those women, now. How did the Hillary campaign find and recruit them? Did the Democrats run a classified ad, ‘If you’d like to help Hillary win and you’ve ever had any contact with Donald Trump and you’re willing to say he bumped you, please call Democrat attorneys Gloria Allred or Lisa Bloom at the following number. Free meals and airfare, other perks available’?

“What about the British guy who told the Daily Mail he was sitting across the aisle from Trump and the one who said she was groped on an airliner, guy said it was the woman whose hands were all over Trump, that she confessed to this fellow passenger when Trump was in the men’s room that she hoped to get the rich guy to marry her?

“Meantime, who paid these women’s legal fees and travel costs? If the Hillary campaign paid, how was that reported on campaign finance reports? If Allred and Bloom charged less than their usual fees, was the difference reported as an in-kind contribution to the Hillary campaign? Are any of these women willing to admit now that they did it for political reasons, to try and help Hillary win?

“Do any reporters regret promoting their totally undocumented, uncorroborated charges with zero skepticism? If not, ask them how much time or space they’ve given to Juanita Broddrick’s quite credible report that she was raped by Bill Clinton, or to Hillary’s well-documented, illegal, multi-million-dollar ‘pay for play’ operation at the State Department.”

3) JOBS AND FACTORIES SHIPPED OVERSEAS

Back in 2016, the geniuses of the political Left—including Barack Obama himself—ridiculed Donald Trump’s claims that American factories and jobs have been shipped overseas, and that he could and would bring them back. Obama famously got himself videotaped at a ‘PBS Town Hall,” telling a hand-picked audience that it simply couldn’t be done. “What kind of magic wand does he have?” asked a man with zero experience in business, trade or commerce:

(The “magic wand” diatribe: https://news.grabien.com/story-flashback-obama-mocks-trump-promising-keep-carrier-plant-us )

For decades, laid-off machinists and steel workers in this country have been told by these paid-off call girls of the multi-national corporate globalists “Get an apron and apply for a job as a busboy at the International House of Pancakes. Haven’t you heard? America is a ‘service economy’ now; nothing to be done about it.”

In fact, I’ve got a friend who used to be in the machine-shop business, who was telling me YEARS before Trump got into politics that “factories being shipped overseas” wasn’t just political rhetoric, it’s been going on LITERALLY. Competition from China and other countries that blatantly violate our patents—often sending us lesser quality-controlled stuff that can break at really bad times, like when a jet is airborne—drives these outfits out of business.

Harry would get the auction catalog, he’d go and see the Chinese literally buy all the fancy, computer-controlled machine tools (the “machines that make machines”), pack them up, and ship them back to China.

In only a year-and-a-half in office—despite not only every congressional Democrat but more than half of the RINOS trying to block EVERYTHING he’s trying to do—Donald Trump is showing us PRECISELY how a tough, knowledgeable, confident trade negotiator can start to turn this around.

Aren’t there any reporters out there in the “legacy media” who find this CURIOUS? Who might want to ask some real questions about how it’s being done—something that for decades we were told was impossible—instead of just reading the prepared questions they’re handed, about the “dangers of a trade war?”

Isn’t there a single fiber of independence left in you? Maybe enough to hand that list of questions back to your editor and say, “These are the same questions Chris Wallace and Martha Raddatz and Wolf Blitzer asked Ross and Lighthizer and Mnuchin on TV last weekend. Where are you getting these questions? Do they all come out of the same hive? I think maybe we should do a story on the hive that’s generating these identical lists of questions. Who handed them to YOU, and where did HE get them?”

No? Didn’t think so.

So maybe it’s time to admit, not just that you’re a lady of easy acquaintance, but that you’re not a particularly talented or energetic one.

4) BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA, MAN OF MYSTERY

How does a kid whose high-school nickname was “Barry the Stoner” get into Columbia? Who paid his tuition? One of those people from Arabia that he later bowed down to? Why?

How come no one who attended Columbia during those years has ever come forward to say they remember being at school with Obama? Who were his dorm mates and girlfriends? Where are his term papers, his senior thesis?

The little-known and underqualified Obama got into the U.S. Senate because his better-known opponent’s divorce child-custody file got released to the public, revealing wife Jeri Ryan—“Star Trek Voyager’s” luscious “Seven-of-Nine”—accused her ex (Jack Ryan, formerly of Goldman-Sachs, who even has the same name as the hero of some of those Tom Clancy novels) of urging her to participate in public sex acts in sex clubs. How did a Superior Court judge in heavily Democrat Los Angeles County come to release that file, which both Ryans agreed to keep sealed, to protect their then-5-year-old son? Why has no one ever investigated the motivations for Judge Robert Schnider’s curious action, without which Barack Obama would almost certainly still be a low-rent Chicago “community organizer”?

The strange chain of events that led to the election of a mystery-man president is somehow less interesting and important than a publicity-hungry porn star saying she once boinked Donald Trump, 10 or 12 years ago—despite the fact we know she accepted $130,000 in exchange for signing a document, years ago, saying she had in fact NOT ever had sex with him and would never mention such a claim again—in which she apparently agreed to pay a $2 million penalty each time she did? You’re happy to be “in bed” with this kind of morally pure truth-teller?

Oh, and how about 5) CATASTROPHIC MAN-MADE GLOBAL WARMING

(It’s a bunch of bull. Pull on your spectacles and go do some reading.)

— V.S.

 

Reprinted from the Vin Suprynowicz blog at www.vinsuprynowicz.com/. This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 30th