Bunch of Things

So I haven't written in a while and some things have been gnawing at my mind to get out into print.

Eason Jordon:
He made some pretty terrible accusations that the military targets jounalists. No one really beleives this to be true but he has made similar claims several times. After a big hubbub, he resigned from CNN. Michelle Malkin has a nice round-up in case your interested (or just google Easongate). I don't care go into it but I have this to say:

It sucks that people lose their jobs over random little things that they say. What I think probably happened was that this guy was used to talking to his liberal leaning friends. When they say things like the military targets journalists, everyone just takes it as grim fact that the US military is evil. But then he slipped and said it in some moderately public forum and he really couldn't back it up.

I think a lot of people have had similar experiences. At least I have. That's 100% of my sample size. So this is my tale. I have listened to my share of fringe radio. I'm not talking about Rush or Air America. I'm talking about college radio stations that let community people host shows. I've listened to both far, far left and far, far right shows (although the radio program I occationally catch where I live now is far right). They're a lot of fun. Anyway, if you're not paying attention, it can be confusing which side they are because the fringe people have the same distrust for government and penchance for conspiracy theories. I like to say that when you go far enough left or far enough right they eventually meet.

So, one day I was having dinner with some co-workers. A co-workers child was there. We were talking politics and I made my far left equals far right type statement. And the kid questioned me on it. There was nothing mean spirited, he just really wanted to know what I meant. That flustered me though and I really couldn't explain myself. I had just said something that I thought was understood but I couldn't defend the thought when questioned.

I think that the Eason Jordon thing might be like that. And it sucks that he had to lose his job over it. Everyone knows CNN is left leaning and besides you can't expect the people working there to be politically neutral.

It sort of reminds me of what happened at the college that I went to. The facts may be slightly off but this is what I remember. There was a spree of annonymous, racist threats on some minorities. It was kinda scary thinking that there were people like that (violent and stupid) out around campus somewhere. When they caught the person, it turned out to be an african american woman who was trying to have an excuse to give to her family for leaving grad school. She wanted to say that she was scared rather than she was failing.

So that's the background. When she was caught, a senior administrator said something like she (the administrator) thought it was going to be a white male. Within a month she was forced to resign even though most people thought the same thing. She had had a pretty decent career ended just because of one little thing that she said.

I just think that it's harsh.

John Gannon / Jim Guckert:
This is the guy who used to be a gay prostitute who reported for a conservative paper and was able to get into the white house press room. Apparently, he asked easy questions for the administration spokespeople to answer. Instead of praising him for turning his life around, the liberal blogs have hounded him into quiting his job. (example from the only lib blog left that I read, another bit from a blog I don't read regularly).

No one had ever heard of this guy or the news org that he worked for but now his personal life and his past is being tossed about and he is out of a job. That sucks.

Powerline:
In a related bit, I want to talk about powerline. I read powerline and it is normaly a fine blog. But then I happened apon this post (warning, bad language) . The gist is that this guy sent powerline a polite message about the Gannon story and Hindrocket from powerline wrote him a barely coherent response with lots of swearing.

At first I didn't believe it. I just figured it was a hoax but I couldn't let go of it. So I broke one of my rules, the "Never interact with your entertainment" rule. (I am not a fan of crowd participation.) I had to email him and find out if it was true. Apparently, a lot of people did because he wrote this response, basically saying that he got a bunch of hate mail and he finally snapped, but at the wrong person.

I just find that inexcusable. I don't care how mad you are about the Dems taking your money and blaming you for whatever they can think of, you should never fall into swearing at them. Hate mail comes with the turf of having a popular blog (I think, I don't have any first hand knowledge of that though).

This whole thing has allowed them to say "These are not nice people." and have something to back that claim up with. The left can now feel self rightious for a time because one of ours slipped.

Inexcusable (but he shouldn't lose his job over it).

mwz
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Update: Fixing some crazy html problems.