), and adding in one small implied reference to Obama -- just enough, and passed it off as Iacocca's warning to the nation about Obama.So much for the trick of calling something a WSJ article when it wasn't. The next posting: Detailed responses to Fake "Wall Street Journal Article" tackles its nonsense point by point.
Dear Mom,
I can only say so much about the article with a couple of minutes research, but will take a closer look at it later [as you can see I went on for more than a
couple of minutes, but still haven't dealt with the article point by point, but I'll get to that].
To me it extremely upsetting and somewhat frightening that good people who once saw politics in a fairly level headed way are up to their eyeballs in material that is so systematically dishonest.
I really think the reason things look so bad to so many people in America is to a big extent because this avalance of propaganda and twisting facts and seeing things one-sidedly is like nothing we've ever seen before. These forwarded emails are the worst. They are full of lies and there is nobody to track down and try to expose for the liars that they are. They make a constant racket of claims that public people like Rush Limbaugh would never touch because it would destroy their reputations, but these wild claims prepare people for Rush Limbaugh and others with their less wild but complementary assertions and their general conclusions..
The internet is a great thing potentially, but it has disoriented a lot of people. It gives every worldview however extreme a place to meet and build up steam. Not just "Tea Partiers", but people who believe 9/11 was a hoax and that really the Bush government blew up the World Trade Center; and a similar group in Britain says the blowing up of trains there was staged by the government. Not to mention it is the main way terrorists are recruited and promote themselves, and spread new techniques, like IEDs (Improvised explosive devices) and technologies for suicide bombers.
People no longer have to get in a room with people with different leanings, and discuss things, and arrive at a plausible view of things. There is no pull toward the center the way there was when we had 3 TV networks that have to give "equal time" to the counter-argument if they put on something that was blatantly political.
If you search for the supposed author of the "Wall Street Journal Article", named "Eddie Sessions" on online.wsj.com (Wall Street Journal Web page), you find nothing - I'm really don't know if there is any such person. WSJ wasn't the first place I went, and after what I learned so far, I was hoping to find an explanation. There are many links to analyses of this article on the web, one is
http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/makebelieve.asp
This Snopes website is a major source for information on hoaxes. It does not seem all that purely liberal. At least, it (Snopes) runs ads like:
* "Barack Obama Video Jokes Watch Jokes made of Barack Obama."
* "Ann Coulter - Free Get weekly email alerts on the latest from Ann Coulter - Free!"
Anyway, about the article, the bottom line for Snopes was:
This piece was actually penned by Alan Caruba, who posted it to his "Warning Signs" blog on 2 January 2010.
There is some speculation that maybe, just maybe, it appeared as the blog equivalent of a "letter to the editor" on a WSJ blog, but it never appeared as an article, or even an editorial in the Wall Street journal.
Note that it isn't just innocently credited to the WSJ. The intro part of that email referred to the WSJ as "the most widely circulated newspaper in America". It bothers me to see editorial features called "articles" -- the WSJ has a very high reputation for journalistic integrity, but their editorial page can be quite propagandistic -- but this as I hope I've made clear goes way beyond that.
(Alan Caruba's -- the real author -- general info: http://www.blogger.com/profile/10901162110385985193, and here is the link to the article as posted on his web site:
http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/2010/01/obamas-make-believe-life.html)
I think the U.S. is probably essentially further from socialism than it was in the 1950s when some people had 90+% marginal income brackets, and Interstate Highways were starting to replace state roads and state or privately owned turnpikes and bridges for getting around the country. The post office had a monopoly on shipping packages; there were no Fedex or UPS. The "Phone company" was another monopoly that was called private, but was so tightly controlled and supported by the government that it didn't act like a normal private company). Bell Labs (the research and development part of AT&T) was more like a giant university than like any part of any business that exists today, and we have them to thank for the transister, integrated circuits, and lasers, the foundation of the whole top level of modern technology.
Broadcasting networks were governed by the "fairness doctrine" (so Fox news would not have been possible). The state and federal park system was being built up -- compare it to the tacky private tourist destinations that are mostly a thing of the past now -- the little museums and zoos, the wax museums, the cave tours, etc. They were "free market" but somehow didn't provide such a satisfying experience.
It is debatable whether all of these things are good or not, but what is not debatable is that we were far and away the most successful nation in the world at that time, and the middle class was stronger than ever before or since, and expanding. So the idea that, after 3 decades of mostly moving to the right -- towards deregulation in every area including financial products and oil drilling and coal mining standards -- that after all this rightward movement, the government might take on a new responsibilities, or taxes might rise back to where they were during the Reagan years -- that some movement back to the "left" will mean a rapid slide to Stalinism -- and that that could happen with half the fear and loathing that has been drummed up towards Obama -- it just doesn't hold water.
As technology and the business environment evolve, some things will seem to be best managed by government that never were before (or maybe never existed before) and some things that were government concerns get "spun off" to the private sector, or regulated businesses become deregulated, so they really behave like private business matters. All kinds of communication and transportation are far more "private" than they used to be. Meanwhile the environment and esp. the quality of the air and water became much more public matters, and while there was a cost to the private sector, the Great Lakes and many other bodies of water stopped turning into sewers.
Well, I could keep working on this for days, but had better stop for now and try to get some work done.
Love, Hal
Here is the article:On Mon, 12 Apr 2010, ________ wrote:
> I read this and think, yes, how did we get him in that office. How do
> you see it?
> Love, mom
>
> Wall Street Journal Sizes up Obama - They've Got Him Figured Out
>
>
> A short article from the Wall Street Journal that needs to be read by
> every level headed American!!!
>
> A "deadly" article regarding Obama, at the Wall Street Journal, which
> today is the most widely circulated newspaper in America .
>
>
> Article from the Wall Street Journal - by Eddie Sessions:
>
> "I have this theory about Barack Obama. I think he's led a kind of
> make-believe life in which money was provided and doors were opened
> because at
> some point early on somebody or some group took a look at this tall, good
> looking, half-white, half-black, young man with an exotic African/Muslim
> name
> and concluded he could be guided toward a life in politics where his
> facile
> speaking skills could even put him in the White House.
>
> In a very real way, he has been a young man in a very big hurry. Who else
> do you know has written two memoirs before the age of 45? "Dreams of My
> Father" was published in 1995 when he was only 34 years old. The
> "Audacity of
> Hope" followed in 2006. If, indeed, he did write them himself. There are
> some who think that his mentor and friend, Bill Ayers, a man who calls
> himself a "communist with a small 'c'" was the real author.
>
> His political skills consisted of rarely voting on anything that might be
> deemed controversial. He went from a legislator in the Illinois
> legislature
> to the Senator from that state because he had the good fortune of having
> Mayor Daley's formidable political machine at his disposal.
>
> He was in the U.S. Senate so briefly that his bid for the presidency was
> either an act of astonishing self-confidence or part of some greater game
> plan that had been determined before he first stepped foot in the
> Capital.
> How, many must wonder, was he selected to be a 2004 keynote speaker at
> the
> Democrat convention that nominated John Kerry when virtually no one had
> ever
> even heard of him before?
>
> He outmaneuvered Hillary Clinton in primaries. He took Iowa by storm. A
> charming young man, an anomaly in the state with a very small black
> population, he oozed "cool" in a place where agriculture was the
> antithesis of cool.
> He dazzled the locals. And he had an army of volunteers drawn to a
> charisma that hid any real substance.
>
> And then he had the great good fortune of having the Republicans select
> one of the most inept candidates for the presidency since Bob Dole. And
> then
> John McCain did something crazy. He picked Sarah Palin, an unknown female
> governor from the very distant state of Alaska . It was a ticket that was
> reminiscent of 1984's Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro and they went
> down
> to defeat.
>
> The mainstream political media fell in love with him. It was a schoolgirl
> crush with febrile commentators like Chris Mathews swooning then and now
> over the man. The venom directed against McCain and, in particular,
> Palin,
> was extraordinary.
>
> Now, nearly a full year into his first term, all of those gilded years
> leading up to the White House have left him unprepared to be President.
> Left
> to his own instincts, he has a talent for saying the wrong thing at the
> wrong time. It swiftly became a joke that he could not deliver even the
> briefest of statements without the ever-present Tele-Prompters.
>
> Far worse, however, is his capacity to want to "wish away" some terrible
> realities, not the least of which is the Islamist intention to destroy
> America and enslave the West. Any student of history knows how swiftly
> Islam
> initially spread. It knocked on the doors of Europe, having gained a
> foothold
> in Spain .
>
> The great crowds that greeted him at home or on his campaign "world tour"
> were no substitute for having even the slightest grasp of history and the
> reality of a world filled with really bad people with really bad
> intentions.
>
> Oddly and perhaps even inevitably, his political experience, a cakewalk,
> has positioned him to destroy the Democrat Party's hold on power in
> Congress
> because in the end it was never about the Party. It was always about his
> communist ideology, learned at an early age from family, mentors, college
> professors, and extreme leftist friends and colleagues.
>
> Obama is a man who could deliver a snap judgment about a Boston police
> officer who arrested an "obstreperous" Harvard professor-friend, but
> would
> warn Americans against "jumping to conclusions" about a mass murderer at
> Fort
> Hood who shouted "Allahu Akbar." The absurdity of that was lost on no
> one.
> He has since compounded this by calling the Christmas bomber "an isolated
> extremist" only to have to admit a day or two later that he was part of
> an
> al Qaeda plot.
>
> He is a man who could strive to close down our detention facility at
> Guantanamo even though those released were known to have returned to the
> battlefield against America . He could even instruct his Attorney General
> to
> afford the perpetrator of 9/11 a civil trial when no one else would ever
> even
> consider such an obscenity. And he is a man who could wait three days
> before
> having anything to say about the perpetrator of yet another terrorist
> attack on Americans and then have to elaborate on his remarks the
> following day
> because his first statement was so lame.
>
> The pattern repeats itself. He either blames any problem on the Bush
> administration or he naively seeks to wish away the truth.
>
> Knock, knock. Anyone home? Anyone there? Barack Obama exists only as the
> sock puppet of his handlers, of the people who have maneuvered and
> manufactured this pathetic individual's life.
>
> When anyone else would quickly and easily produce a birth certificate,
> this man has spent over a million dollars to deny access to his. Most
> other
> documents, the paper trail we all leave in our wake, have been
> sequestered
> from review. He has lived a make-believe life whose true facts remain
> hidden.
>
>
> We laugh at the ventriloquist's dummy, but what do you do when the dummy
> is President of the United States of America ?"
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