One: We Will Report No Story Until It’s Time
I had a post all ready to go regarding the media ignoring the devastation in the southern Appalachians caused by Hurricane Helene; about how the story had been dropping from the front page faster than the latest Trump assassination attempt, despite the mounting death toll, towns wiped out, etc…
Then the other night I see all the media outlets, as if a switch had been thrown, starting to give the story (some of) the attention it deserves.
I was curious as to why the change. Why did the bat signal go out for corporate media to acknowledge what’s happening out there (for them) in Gap-Toothed Cletus Land?
Then I realized what it was. With the carnage coming out of Appalachia too big to ignore, there was the danger that with the bad optics of Kamala, and Biden out-of-view, that this could be the Democrats’ version of Katrina. So if you read the stories since Sunday night, nearly every one contains an element of what Biden and Kamala are personally doing to help people who will never vote for them. Case in point, the five-minute photo-op of Kamala visiting FEMA.
You can’t buy the quality of public relations the corporate media provides the Democrats.
Two: Army Recruitment Weasels
A friend of mine contacted me about an op-ed in the Washington Post regarding military recruitment. It’s full of the usual gaslighting regarding how the Biden Administration was solving the military recruitment problem (that it had created) by meeting goals through better marketing and reorganizing the recruitment process.
In reality the military only achieved its goals because it lowered both the goals and the recruiting standards. Note, any time you hear about an organization that doesn’t meet KPI but crows about “momentum,” do a quick look at the numbers and you’ll find a bunch of one-time tricks used to juice the numbers. That’s what is happening here, with lowered standards dealing with physical and mental fitness, proficiency, and red flags such as tattoos and prior drug use. Good luck keeping that “momentum” going next year.
Then again next year isn’t an election year, right?
There are many causes of the military recruitment crisis, but a key one is a lack of leadership especially at the civilian level. I saw this exchange between Army Secretary Christine Wormuth and Senator Cotton when the latter questioned her playing with enlistment targets in order to prevent negative headlines. Her response?:
Wormuth said the Army looks at “what’s possible” and sets goals that are achievable.
I found that response horrifying. Management 101 states that failure to meet a KPI is a key information signal in the organization that something is wrong and needs to be changed. Goals are set to the needs of the service and then actions are geared toward the accomplishment of those goals. What Wormuth is saying is that either recruitment goals have no relation to the needs of the service, which is a failure of senior leadership, or that she is just going to ignore those needs in favor of avoiding bad optics. Either way she’s willingly corrupting the signal and this cannot be tolerated.
Three: Kerry, the Cr*p Weasel
I’m trying to think of a bigger scoundrel, a more ridiculous figure in American politics for the past 50 years besides Joe Biden and I keep coming back to John Kerry. Biden and Kerry both have so much in common: criminally ambitious, greedy, insecure, and dumb as a box of rocks.
Kerry has been in the limelight for 50 years: star witness to Congress on war crimes, US Senator, presidential nominee, Secretary of State, Special Envoy for Climate. He really is (unfortunately) an elder statesman.
This is a guy who got his political start in a way that makes Kamala Harris look like a saint, by throwing his fellow Vietnam War veterans under the war crimes bus. He was willing to be a figurehead as Secretary of State (foreign policy under Obama was run by the West Wing and staffers at State) in exchange for the title which he later leveraged into business connections. Then there was his time as special envoy on climate, where he lectured the world on consumption and fossil fuels while flying around the world in his private jet and living the high life on his wife’s (Republican) money.
So he’s been a corrupt, power-hungry hypocrite for half-a-century. So is a lot of DC. What makes him a a cr*p weasel? This:
”And people go and then people self-select where they go for their news and information. Then you get into a vicious cycle. So it’s really, really hard, much harder to build consensus today then at any time in the 45, 50 years I’ve been involved in this and there is a lot of discussion now about how to curb those entities in order to guarantee that you’re going to have some accountability on facts, etc… Our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to hammer it out of existence. What we need is to win the ground, win the right to govern by hopefully having winning enough votes that you are free to be able to implement change.”
So there you go, a man who has sworn numerous times to support and defend the Constitution just told his globalist buddies at WEF that he (meaning the Democrats) was going to throw that document under the bus. Given that he’s dumb as the aforementioned box of rocks, this thought is not his own, but there is a special place in the pit for an elder statesman willing to trash our Constitution in front of foreigners.
Who is going to hold him to account?
You know, Walz made a crack about the First Amendment not protecting misinformation. I wonder if Vance will force him tonight to defend that and what Kerry said at WEF.