Saturday, June 24, 2023

Troubles for RFK Jr.? Abortion and The First Amendment

Tons of e-mails to the public e-mail account today and one topic has over 100 e-mails.  Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and abortion.  In one e-mail after another, I'm repeatedly told that I hold the other Democratic nominees to a higher standard and that if Marianne Williamson or Cornel West had --


Wait.


The drive-bys e-mailing are that stupid?


Cornel West is not running for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination.  Joe Biden is, Marianne Williamson is and Robert is.  


Cornel is running for the Green Party nomination.


A media outlet posted a video of Robert discussing abortion in reply to a question (from a woman who does not believe in abortion -- and is apparently waiting for Santa to show up on Christmas morning to convince her).  


It's WMUR and they've changed the title to include that he's pro-choice.




WMUR has changed the title.  It now includes that he's pro-choice.  But did you stream it before the title change because, if you had, you would have heard him say that it's not the government's business and that it's a woman's body and it's her decision.  He doesn't personally like abortion, he loathes it. 


Now maybe before the title changed, those of you e-mailing were confused but, then again, considering how many of you seem to think Cornel West is running for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination -- Baptist and Marxist Cornel doesn't really have a personal political party i.d. but he did get the nomination from The People's Party and is now competing for the Green Party's nomination . . .  Well someone wrong about that may not be all there to begin with.


Robert needs to address the war on LGBTQ+ and that's him.  I don't want to hear from Cheryl again.  I am not pulling her into the campaign.  He is the candidate and he can't hide behind her.  Once upon a time GOP candidates would make statements similar to Robert's today on abortion without his qualifier that it was his personal opinion and they would then hide behind their wives who were pro-choice.  (Robert offered his personal opinion and his opinion on the right itself.  On the right, he's in favor.  It is a basic human right and it is not the government's business.  I feel that's obvious that he said that but since so many are confused, let me belabor the point.)


Nancy Reagen was never elected president and didn't nominate any person to the Supreme Court.  What Nancy thought or Barbara Bush thought was irrelevant.


So Robert needs to address the LGBTQ+ issue and do it quick.  Ruth's writing about this right now.  For two weeks now, I've stayed away from this topic while she mulled and waited for Robert to make a statement.  I called her and she's got a draft of a post that'll go up shortly.  


As for calling out?  I'm about to call out Robert, wait a paragraph or two.  


But it's not my problem that Marianne can't get her act together.  Ava and I were planning on just doing a piece at THIRD on entertainment -- just covering an entertainment show or two.  But due to the disgusting Chris Hedges and an info dump from Marianne's campaign, we now have more than enough to do a piece focusing just on the news.  But Marianne's campaign can't get its act together and that's her fault.  She's become a scared little bunny and that's pathetic.  As we listened to three with the campaign, Ava and I were exchanging looks and trying not to laugh.  This is beyond pathetic. The way she's too scared to take any kind of stand.  So it appears we're trapped into covering it.


But for those needing Robert to be called out, here it is.


He's reTweeting a two-part article at his site.


It's a poorly written article -- and how do you talk about Pottinger's kid and the CIA without noting the father's ties to the CIA and the father's ties to  Gloria Steinem (again, Gloria's lived past the point where the press indulges her lies which is why THE NEW REPUBLIC, THE NEW YORKER and THE NEW YORK TIMES have all stopped in the last ten years protecting her and now write the truth, she was CIA, and leave her with nothing but her own angry letters to the editorial board) -- and I don't have time to cover it all.  In relation to this site and it's long running scope, we'll note this:



The Manhattan Institute’s City Journal listed Judith Miller as a contributing editor. You might recall Miller as the hawkish New York Times journalist known for her deep CIA connections and for peddling false information about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction in support of the CIA’s expansionist warmongering. (Miller went to jail for her role in illegally outing undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame in revenge for Plame’s husband’s opposition to the Iraq war.)



There are two huge errors there.  First off, Judith wasn't plugged into the intel community.  Chris Hedges was.  That's why the intel community arranged his infamous interviews that led to his lying in print that Iraq was linked to 9/11.  Again, the first to get that lie into the paper -- in fact on the front page of THE NEW YORK TIMES -- in what passed for 'reporting.'


Judith's deep connections were always with the administration.  Michael R. Gordon's were with the military (including military intelligence) and Chris Hedges was always tied closely to the CIA. 


Rule of thumb, the missionary types will always drift to the CIA --ask Gloria.  


But when this was first popping up in the news, we did our parody piece here on "Rudith Miller" tying her to Scooter Libby because, though it was January 2006, all of us in the know knew Scooter was Judith's source on Valerie Plame being CIA.

The CIA doesn't burn their own.  If Judith were CIA -linked she wouldn't have gotten the story.  If she were CIA-linked she would have done what David Corn did which was explode repeatedly online and scream and try to make this into the biggest story of the century.  


Judith ties were to the administration, that's who her sources were, that's who fed her.

Judith's career is not one of supporting the CIA.  She sucks up to the biggest, most obvious power and that's the executive branch.  So trying to tie her into the CIA is poor reporting.  At that, THE NEW YORK TIMES had five well known writers the CIA linked to (that includes Chris Hedges).  When you make that mistake you fool the deluded and addled.  But the rest of us tend to think, "Wait, does Dick Russell know anything about the CIA?"  Because, again, it's a rather obvious error.


But the bigger one and the one that he -- Robert -- needs to be asked about is:

 (Miller went to jail for her role in illegally outing undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame in revenge for Plame’s husband’s opposition to the Iraq war.)


I need to know where his campaign stands on press liberty.


First off, it wasn't illegal.  Is this an opinion piece by Dick Russell or is this supposed to be hard journalism reporting?  Opinion piece, sure you call it illegal.  Factual reporting?  What legal body ruled the action to be illegal because I didn't see anyone go to prison.


Second, Judith went to jail.  She didn't go to jail because of anything she printed.  She went to jail for refusing to reveal her source.  Judith did many things wrong as a reporter but that wasn't one of them.  Her source told her Valerie was CIA.  (Judith didn't out her in print, Robert Novak did.)  Her source didn't burn her -- if he had, she could have outed him and no one would have blinked.  


But what she did in that instance is what reporters are supposed to do: Protect their sources.


She went to jail for refusing to expose a source.  And, please note, she's not the one who outed Valerie.


This was a huge overstep by the US government.  Had Judith done what they were trying to force her to do, it would have been a huge setback for journalism.  People wanted to ignore that.  Because they're uneducated idiots.  I still get e-mails on this all this time later about how I'm wrong and blah blah blah when I tried to inform on basic facts.  No, sorry.  Judy Garland was pissed at CBS for what they said about her and she's the one who started this process.  She's the one who went after a gossip columnist over a source (an unnamed CBS executive) who had made disparaging comments about her.  You don't apparently learn in school -- I don't know if they don't teach it or if some of you just don't know how to listen -- but this a very serious issue.


Judith Miller did many things wrong.  But on this, she was right.  


And she went to jail for it.  She believed in it that much.


So to now find Robert's website carrying a two-part article written by Robert's co-writer (CLIMATE IN CRISIS, for example) that appears to parenthetically call out/trash/mislead on Judith Miller's correct stance of refusing to reveal her sources to the government?  And to find Robert Tweeting the article, promoting it?


Oh, hell no.  Oh, no.  He needs to answer on press freedom.  


And this will be poo-pahed and treated as no big thing I'm sure.  But it's actually one of the biggest issue's there is: Do we have press freedom or not?


It takes more than just supporting Julian Assange (and I think we should all support Julian) to defend press freedom.  It takes standing up to the overreach of government when they try to short-cut their own investigations by forcing a reporter to give up a source. 


The disdain that Dick Russell is offering should have been recognized by Robert the minute he read the article.  Maybe he didn't read it?


Regardless, he's created a problem for himself that he needs to now clarify: Is he for press freedom or not?


1) He's for it when it comes to Julian.


2) He's for it when it comes to his being allowed to express his beliefs without censorship.


Doesn't mean he's for press freedom.


THE NEW YORK TIMES has hid behind Judith Miller and acted as though their problems were all due to her.  Not true.  But they walked away from her.  Do you know when?  When she refused to give up her source.


Why?


Because they didn't like the administration.  I didn't either.  Bully Boy Bush, I'll never give him the p-title and never have.  The worst administration ever in my lifetime.  


I would have loved to see Scooter and Dick and Karl rounded up and put in prison leaving Bully Boy Bush with no one to change his diapers or feed him.


But greater than my hatred for Bush is my belief in a free press.  


And I'm not going to chop up The First Amendment for political desires.

THE TIMES had been way to close to the Bush administration and now, in the minds of some, Judith could bring down the administration by outing her source.  She refused to and that's when the paper turned on her.  They wouldn't have run Maureen Dowd's column attacking Judith prior to that (Maureen wrote a good column) and they wouldn't have broken with her.


It's a sad reality that when it was time to stand up for journalism, it was this site, not THE NEW YORK TIMES, that called out the overreach loudly and clearly.  

Now Robert has a problem that he needs to address. 


There are other problems with the article.  And we could do a fact check.  I don't feel like it.  He wants to be president and he's running for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination.  With those goals in mind, the most serious issue raised by the 'report' is the issue of The First Amendment and his co-writer's desire to misrepresent why Judith went to jail instead of applauding her for it?


Here's Robert's two Tweets:





The public e-mail for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com -- community members use the private e-mail because I doubt I'll go back into the public account until Sunday night and no oen works it on the weekend but me.

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