"The general sentiment of mankind is that a man who will not fight for himself, when he has the means of doing so, is not worth being fought for by others, and this sentiment is just," Frederick Douglass said in 1857. "The poet was as true to common sense as to poetry when he said, 'Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow.'"
What is the job of the news media? To report the news. Everyone agrees on that. But some well-intentioned self-imposed ethical guidelines that members of the news media take for granted are getting in the way of the industry's fundamental mission: telling everything they know to a public whose right to know is sacred.
In 2016, there were 17 major candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, so many they had to have two sets of debates, and the guy who won was the first of all. Seven pundit-viable candidates have declared for 2020 on the Democratic side, more probably on the way, yet many Democrats say they're not excited by any of them.
President Donald Trump keeps coming under attack for his foreign policy, predictably by Democrats but also by legacy Republican leaders.
Generation X -- born between about 1961 and 1981 -- have been "disappeared" from the media like a fallen-out-of-favor Soviet apparatchik airbrushed out of a picture from atop Lenin's tomb.
I admit it: My bias derived from self-interest. I was a bag boy. But that didn't make me wrong when I reacted to the news that supermarkets would make customers bag their own groceries. This, I told my friends at the time, is the first brick in a road to perdition.
Liberals are supposed to feel other people's pain. Now, they seem more intent on inflicting it.
News conferences are a double oxymoron. Pressers aren't conferences; conferences involve back-and-forth communication. Nor do they have anything to do with news. News is neither created nor conveyed at a press conference.
There are no eye sockets big enough for the eye-rolling I want to do when I hear American politicians express shock at political violence like the last week's domestic terror trifecta: A racist white man murdered two black people at a Kentucky grocery store, a white right-winger stands accused of mailing more than a dozen pipe bombs to Democratic politicians and celebrities and a white anti-Semite allegedly gunned down 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue.
The U.S. occupation of Afghanistan is in its 17th year, with no end in sight. The U.S. has killed 1 million Iraqis over the last 15 years. We're killing Syrians, Yemenis and Somalis. None of the victims threatened us.
Innocent until proven guilty.
Donald Trump may last; he may go away. But the influence of his revolutionary approach to American politics will endure. What he learned and taught about campaigning will be studied and emulated for years to come. Social media matters. In 2016, his free Twitter feed defeated Hillary Clinton's $1.2 billion fundraising juggernaut.
What is wrong with us? Specifically: What is wrong with liberal Democrats?
Christine Blasey Ford has accused Brett Kavanaugh of trying to rape her during a party while they were teenagers. The political stakes are high: If Kavanaugh's confirmation vote fails in the Senate and Democrats win the body back in November, conservatives will watch their dream of a solidly reliable 5-4 majority go up in smoke.
The most disturbing aspect of The New York Times op-ed by an anonymous "senior official in the Trump Administration" isn't its content.
The content isn't significant enough to make an impression.
Imagine a store that makes its customers miserable. The interior is ugly and uncomfortable. The staff members range from indifferent and slow to rude and incompetent. You pay sky-high prices for inferior goods. Often you pay full price yet leave the place empty-handed.
This past week, more than 300 American newspapers colluded -- if the word fits -- to simultaneously publish editorials declaring themselves, contra Trump, not "the enemy of the people." Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed a resolution declaring that it, too, did not consider the press to be, in a phrase that evokes the rhetoric of the former Soviet Union, state enemies.
When 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez upset a 10-term incumbent congressman in New York -- in a set of Democratic primaries that saw self-proclaimed democratic socialists in the Bernie Sanders mold pick up seats across the country -- The New York Times (which, true to its institutional establishmentarianism, didn't bother to cover her campaign) predicted that her victory would "reverberate across the party and the country."
The Democrat-led anti-Trump "Resistance" and its numerous media mouthpieces have been promoting their "Russia hacked the election" narrative for two years. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi fired the biggest recent salvo in this campaign after Trump invited Russian President Vladimir Putin to visit Washington.
First: No. It's not too early to discuss the 2020 election. The Iowa caucuses are only a year and a half away. Any presidential hopeful who hasn't begun chatting up donors by now will find it nearly impossible to mount a viable campaign.
