In the former Soviet Union, when the regime didn't like your beliefs, they sent you to the Gulag to rot. In third world dictatorships today, when the regime doesn't like your beliefs, they line you up against a wall and assassinate you by firing squad, or worse. In the land of liberal, progressive Massachusetts, when the regime doesn't like your beliefs, they smear you publicly with ad hominem attacks in regime-compliant newspapers and media outlets.
The recent example of Representative Paul Adams is a case in point.
Adams is an attractive, smart, honest, principled conservative politician who challenges the liberal orthodoxies of big government, excessive taxation, intrusive regulation and wasteful bureaucracy. Most importantly, he has the guts to oppose the progressive sacraments of abortion on demand and so-called "same-sex marriage".
Adams won an election for state representative in 2010 as a 28 year-old first-time candidate, beating a liberal democrat mediocrity named Patricia Commane, distinguishable from her statist democrat colleagues on Beacon Hill principally by the fact that she had not yet been indicted.
Despite lip service paid to "diversity" and "tolerance", the "nonjudgmental" liberal overlords who rule Massachusetts could not countenance someone like Adams.
What to do? Answer: Off with his head! But how?
Well, dirty him up a bit. Find a second-rate reporter (easy enough to do) for a third-rate newspaper (easier still) who gets the simplest facts wrong (natch) and is blinded by his own ideological lust. (Gay positive, anti-Mormon, Keith Eddings will do nicely). Next, have the reporter follow the target around all day. Pouring over the first-time candidate's campaign filings with the state's Office of Campaign and Political Finance would be a good use of the reporter's time.
Sooner or later, some technical discrepancy will pop up; after all, in "progressive", over-regulated, nanny states like Massachusetts, everything that is not forbidden is compulsory.
In Adams's case, the smoking gun was in the form of pre-candidacy gifts given to him by . . . his family. (O, the shame of it all!) The candidate then loaned what was now his money to his campaign committee. (Make the bad man stop!)
That each of these transactions was perfectly legal did not stop our reporter from "diming out" Adams to the superintending bureaucrats at OCPF. Next thing you know, OCPF in an ex post facto interpretation of the term "contribution", declared that the family gifts given to Adams before the campaign began are "contributions" under the law.
It's the first case I can think of where two perfectly legitimate transactions, viewed separately, were deemed illegitimate when combined. Good + good = bad?
Only in Massachusetts.
In only remained to inveigh against Adams in a breathless series of "news" stories that portrayed what was at most an after-the-fact technical discrepancy as a grievous moral lapse. Our anti-literate, reality TV-obsessed, brain dead public will take care of the rest, reaching such inane conclusions as the following: "they all do it", or "this one is just as bad as another", or (my favorite) "Republicans are no better than Democrats".
The next thing you know, the corrupt status quo is preserved. Mission accomplished.
This was the formula journalistic hit technique recently used against Adams, first in the smarmy non-news story:
http://www.eagletribune.com/latestnews/x1704534647/Family-funneled-funds-to-Adams
later in a pontificating editorial the following day:
http://www.eagletribune.com/opinion/x1704535905/Editorial-Adams-silence-on-donations-speaks-volumes
At least one poster calling herself "LeoTheLion4" appeared to see through it all:
The recent example of Representative Paul Adams is a case in point.
Adams is an attractive, smart, honest, principled conservative politician who challenges the liberal orthodoxies of big government, excessive taxation, intrusive regulation and wasteful bureaucracy. Most importantly, he has the guts to oppose the progressive sacraments of abortion on demand and so-called "same-sex marriage".
Adams won an election for state representative in 2010 as a 28 year-old first-time candidate, beating a liberal democrat mediocrity named Patricia Commane, distinguishable from her statist democrat colleagues on Beacon Hill principally by the fact that she had not yet been indicted.
Despite lip service paid to "diversity" and "tolerance", the "nonjudgmental" liberal overlords who rule Massachusetts could not countenance someone like Adams.
What to do? Answer: Off with his head! But how?
Well, dirty him up a bit. Find a second-rate reporter (easy enough to do) for a third-rate newspaper (easier still) who gets the simplest facts wrong (natch) and is blinded by his own ideological lust. (Gay positive, anti-Mormon, Keith Eddings will do nicely). Next, have the reporter follow the target around all day. Pouring over the first-time candidate's campaign filings with the state's Office of Campaign and Political Finance would be a good use of the reporter's time.
Sooner or later, some technical discrepancy will pop up; after all, in "progressive", over-regulated, nanny states like Massachusetts, everything that is not forbidden is compulsory.
In Adams's case, the smoking gun was in the form of pre-candidacy gifts given to him by . . . his family. (O, the shame of it all!) The candidate then loaned what was now his money to his campaign committee. (Make the bad man stop!)
That each of these transactions was perfectly legal did not stop our reporter from "diming out" Adams to the superintending bureaucrats at OCPF. Next thing you know, OCPF in an ex post facto interpretation of the term "contribution", declared that the family gifts given to Adams before the campaign began are "contributions" under the law.
It's the first case I can think of where two perfectly legitimate transactions, viewed separately, were deemed illegitimate when combined. Good + good = bad?
Only in Massachusetts.
In only remained to inveigh against Adams in a breathless series of "news" stories that portrayed what was at most an after-the-fact technical discrepancy as a grievous moral lapse. Our anti-literate, reality TV-obsessed, brain dead public will take care of the rest, reaching such inane conclusions as the following: "they all do it", or "this one is just as bad as another", or (my favorite) "Republicans are no better than Democrats".
The next thing you know, the corrupt status quo is preserved. Mission accomplished.
This was the formula journalistic hit technique recently used against Adams, first in the smarmy non-news story:
http://www.eagletribune.com/latestnews/x1704534647/Family-funneled-funds-to-Adams
later in a pontificating editorial the following day:
http://www.eagletribune.com/opinion/x1704535905/Editorial-Adams-silence-on-donations-speaks-volumes
At least one poster calling herself "LeoTheLion4" appeared to see through it all:
"In this sanctimonious editorial, the ET editors, like all good journalists starring in their own movie, purport to do the public a service by hyperventilating over alleged wrongdoing.
But one gets the sense reading between the lines that even the ET editors know that it's all "much ado about nothing", and that the real reason for their hissy fit is not so much the contributions Adams legitimately received but the reporter's questions he audaciously ignored.
Fairly viewed, the only possibly legitimate question raised in this formula journalism one-two punch (smear article yesterday, pompous editorial today) is the apparent late reporting by Adams' campaign committee of the in-kind contributions from Marlborough.
We expect professional democrat cheerleader John ("I'm shocked ... shocked") Walsh to perspire and grow dizzy over that. But more objective readers would note that the contributions were, after all, reported. And, if anything, the delay in doing so underscores the lack of coordination between the Adams campaign and those making in-kind contributions for its benefit (not that there would be anything illegal had there been such coordination). Other than that, there is nothing at all irregular, much less unethical, still less illegal, about anything Adams or his committee did.
In the final analysis, if the ET gets its knickers so easily in a knot over perfectly innocent gifts to a pre-candidate from family members, and perfectly legal in-kind contributions to the candidate by a city committee, no wonder the paper lacks the guts to go after the real dirty money in which our Commonwealth is largely awash, most of which, by the way, flows to candidates and officials whose party affiliation is the same as that of Chairman Walsh.
How we love to strain out the gnat while swallowing the camel."
Oh the humanity. There are three (possibly 4) reasons to be a Democrat in this abysmal state:
ReplyDelete1. Malice
2. Ignorance (moon-battery)
3. Stupidity
4. Any combination of the above
Bringing back the noble art of dueling would raise the level of discourse significantly. It would be lovely to be able to throw down the gauntlet at times and then we could watch those without eternal hope shut up and retreat.