What If The Media Were Moral?

By Ilana Mercer

Media conservatives and liberals were agreed. The Republican brand, as National Review's Jonah Goldberg put it, had been damaged by the debt-ceiling standoff.

Chuckie Krauthammer, another phony conservative, concurred. After badmouthing tea-party Republicans for attempting to leverage a partial government shut-down and debt-ceiling deadline to dilute ObamaCare, Krauthammer scolded "the media" for its biased coverage of the quixotic showdown.

Pot. Kettle. Krauthammer

No sooner had the Senate voted, on Wednesday Oct. 16, to unconditionally reopen the spending spigot—seconded in short succession by Congress and the president—than an unabashed Dana Bash, chief congressional correspondent for CNN, cornered Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). Her angle, like every other media mouthpiece in the country, was the futility of the fight Cruz had spearheaded:

"As you well know, you have a lot of fellow Republicans really downright angry at you because, here we are, almost three weeks later, the strategy that you started out on to defund Obamacare as part of funding the government. They never thought it was going to work because the votes aren't there. And here we are, reopening the government after a lot of bruising political warfare internally, and you got nothing for it."

More a leading suggestion than a journalistic question, Bash's crude calculus—that outcomes, rather than principle, should dictate the political action pursued—was what Americans had been force-fed by her ilk over the past two weeks.

Throughout the so-called shutdown (unnoticed by hardworking Americans), Americans were exposed, day in and day out, to asphyxiating agitprop. The Taliban-like tea party caucus, they were told, was criminally negligent for refusing to allow the government to keep borrowing. Damned they were as "aging, white bigots" for daring to demand changes to a despised law, at the expense of the temporary furlough of 800,000 non-essential oink-sector workers, whose salaries are, on average, double that of the average wage in the country, and whose hefty healthcare and bankrupting retirement benefits the rest of the country can only dream of, but must pay for.

What Cruz had to say throughout the ordeal was not what Americans—who get most of their news from cable television and the news networks—got to hear.

Repeated ad nauseam by these noisy, Democratic sleeper cells were the results of polls that reflected a media-manufactured consensus: "Republicans continue to get more blame than the Obama administration for Washington’s fiscal policy stalemate."

Is there any wonder that infantile America mirrors its squandering government with respect to debt carried? “Like father, like son” goes a saying about the similarities between the behavior of parent and progeny. Like their government, Americans are debt-addled (the “fore horse for oppression and despotism,” forewarned Founding Father Thomas Jefferson). The total household debt in the U.S. stands at $13 trillion; student loans at $3.04 trillion.

If the media were moral, they'd have told Americans these truths.

If the media were moral, they’d have told Americans that the perennial debt crises are manufactured crises.

That the U.S. government’s receipts are more than sufficient to cover its debt payments by a factor of approximately 10.

That the 14th Amendment (Section 4) of the U.S. Constitution prohibits a default on the country's debt.

That if the country were to default on the debt, it would be because President Barack Obama deliberately and maliciously chose to flout the Constitution (it’s the law of the land, unlike Obamacare), and not service the debt, so as to win a political battle.

If the media were moral, they’d tell America that it’s do or die. That capping the debt ceiling is perhaps the only way to compel a government that owes $17 trillion and carries "$70 trillion in off-balance-sheet liabilities" to make do with the loot it collects.

That the stock-market's "confidence," pursuant to lifting the cap on the debt, amounts to faith in confidence men; that soaring stocks in a debt-fueled, stagnant economy is a consequence of the confetti of funny-money raining down from the nation's pantheon: the Federal Reserve Bank.

That non-stop monetary stimulus is the road to ruin—it results in a rise in prices, stocks included. Homes too. And that an increase in the price of an item is not the same as an appreciation in its value.

That the natural laws of economics dictate that Obamacare will increase both public and private debt.

That members of the media-monetary-military-congressional complex are immoral and have an allergy to the truth.

And that's the honest to goodness truth.

ILANA Mercer is a classical liberal writer, based in the United States. She pens WND's longest-standing paleolibertarian column.  ILANA is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies. She is the author of "Into the Cannibal's Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa."  ILANA's website is WWW.IlanaMercer.com . She blogs at www.barelyablog.com

Copyright 2013 Ilana Mercer