George Orwell's Chicago

A funny thing happened in Chicago at Illinois Senator Dick Durbin's press conference.  It was held to cast aspersions on the Tea Party for S&P's downgrade of Uncle Sam's credit rating, and everyone assembled was there to help him spread the narrative.  Everyone but William J. Kelley that is, an independent voice who's published at The American Spectator, Breitbart.com, and the Washington Times Communities.  Kelley likes to raise the important question of who deserves to be the intermediary between events that happen and the public that is subsequently informed, or not informed, about them.  On this occasion he asked Durbin--tried to ask him, Noman should clarify--whether since he'd blamed everyone else for the debacle, the Senator himself bore any responsibility (video of the incident included in the article).   The nerve.  Well that was too much for the good Senator and the liberal flaks coddling him who pass for journalists in Chicago, and all major cities.  The questioner was summarily dismissed, intimidated and removed from the conference by law enforcement.  He was a non-person--a Noman, so to speak--who didn't deserve recognition, or an answer.  Kelley seems to be used to this kind of treatment.

Of course, I’ve been accused of being uncivil before. I’ve also been threatened by other journalists before. But this isn’t about civility; it’s about control. 

The Democrats and their media cronies want to control the news and information. They want to control the political system and its system of punishments and rewards. This system is fundamentally anti-freedom and they – the powers that be - are “OK” with that. 

I was held to a different standard because I write for conservative news outlets and Sen. Durbin didn’t like my question. The mainstream media are merely an adjunct to the Obama campaign and the Democrat National Committee. Not one of them reported this incident. 

The economic crisis is not helped by a compliant, subservient media that tampers with news to help their candidates and causes. In the abscessed cavity of newsrooms around Chicago, this exchange and the remarks Sen. Durbin made to the media’s microphones exists. In Chicago, NBC, CBS, ABC, the Chicago Sun-Times, and every other news outlet, have shown their true colors. They weren’t red, white, and blue.  

And neither are Durbin’s.

The reader can discern for himself whether the question was legitimate.  Noman thinks it was an elementary one of the type that politicians in both parties should be asked, not just the Republican.   Kelley gave Senator Durbin a golden opportunity to demonstrate to the public that he is a thinking man, and not merely an emoting partisan.  Durbin failed, which is not surprising given that he is never tested.  And the establishment journalists who turned on Kelley to shelter the Senator from scrutiny should be prosecuted for perpetrating a criminal fraud on the public, and for impersonating newsmen.

Noman is witnessing a seismic cultural shift for the second time in his life.  The first was when enterprising outsiders like Kelley wrote for Rolling Stone, or Ramparts.  Kelley is Gonzo without the drugs.  Andrew Breitbart is Jann Wenner with scruples.

Over the decades, the counter culture of the 60's became the status quo, and men like Durbin, Jim Anderson and Jay Levine (Anderson and Levine can be seen in the various links) swept into establishment positions with all of the moral smugness of 60's activists, and all of the vices, plus some, of the people they castigated, overran and replaced.  Their predecessors had more capacity for self-reflection, were less blind to their own deficiencies, and possessed moral conscience rather than social conscience.  Durbin et al. are this era's reactionaries checking for tea-partiers under every bed.  If they don't like upstart behavior, that's too bad.  But for it, they wouldn't have their positions.  They set the ground rules; now they have to play by them.

People like Kelley, and the existence of alternative media that enable you to become aware of them lead Noman to think that we are on the brink of a cultural revolution that will flush pharisees like Dick Durbin and his media cronies into the sewer where they belong.  He doesn't know when the tipping point will come.  But, come it will, and sooner rather than later.

For now, Noman wishes everyone to know--especially those readers outside of the United States--how liberal tyranny and oppression of thought and information work in America.  And he wants everyone to see how hostile and uncivil the guardians of public discourse get when their mind-control prerogatives are threatened.  Remember it next time the talking heads drone on about civility.