Georgetown U. Frosh Trumpster Falls Flat Trying To Defend His Hero In WSJ Op-Ed

"If da mainstream media go after the Donald, dey is me enemy!"

Samuel Dubke is reportedly, from his WSJ op-ed bio,  "a freshman this fall at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service".    This brief description appearing at the end of his piece entitled 'Why The Young Tune Politics Out' (p. A15, August 4).    This title supposedly bolstered by his 800 word essay and the "young" (mainly college age) demographic being turned off - according to Dubke - by the "mainstream media".  At the end of the op-ed I wondered whether Georgetown would withdraw its acceptance based on one of the most pathetic, ill thought out works to appear in public in a long time. But then again, maybe we can't hold a college freshman's naïveté  against him. It comes with the age, so to speak.

Young Dubke claims to be fairly saturated by news from MSNBC which is "turned to full volume" at the new organization for which he labors as an intern "5 days week, eight hours a day". Most kids his age would consider themselves lucky to have such a summer gig - especially in terms of experience - but the crass and callow Dubke is hard pressed to be grateful.  For him, he "would rather press the mute button and never have to listen to any of it".

One may inquire then as to what exactly is his problem?  Evidently we can sum it up from his own whining words as follows:

-  He's "dumbfounded by how obfuscating the media has been toward any news that contradicts their neatly packed punditry".   Oh and "how they have ignored much of the public's desire for unbiased an unsensational content".

First, let's recognize how off point his vocabulary is. By "obfuscating" we mean  - from any standard lexicon - the  obscuring of the intended meaning of communication by making the message difficult to understand.   So Frosh Dubke seems to be complaining the mainstream media, in his experience, is obscuring all the communications concerning "contradictory news".    But what is the contradictory news? In fact, as I have shown, it is almost entirely balderdash, i.e. fake news. See e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2017/07/skewering-another-right-wing-conspiracy.html


In fact, what young Dubke regards as "contradicting news" basically falls into the categories of half-baked conspiracy ideations - such as pizzagate and the Fusion GPS -DNC conspiracy rubbish, or out and out dissembling by  their hero. Into the latter we find the bunkum that he really won the popular vote, that he really won New Hampshire (which he also called a "den of drug abuse"), that Obama wiretapped him, and he had the biggest Inaugural crowds ever.

In each case had  this news intern done the most minimal research he'd have learned how the mainstream media fact-checked each and every one of those, showing how all were Trumpian BS,   horse pockey, nonsense, out right lies. So why in hell would any self-respecting news organization publish such bollocks?  Why would a respectable cable news venue broadcast it?  Just to appease dunderheads too lazy to check facts themselves? Dubke doesn't ask himself such questions. He's more miffed that the mainstream press has ignored proven dreck.

Which suggests to us one of two things:

Dubke can't recognize dreck when he sees it, hears it, or -

Dubke believes dreck ought to get a hearing, maybe for the weaker- minded,  to enhance their gullibility.

As for "ignoring the public's desire for unbiased (and unsensational) content", WHICH public? Are we talking about the serious, level-headed public that watches Rachel Maddow's excellent analyses of the Trump-Russia money laundering links on MSNBC? OR, are we talking about the low information, borderline uneducated who go to Breitbart New and FOX - as they feast on Pizzagate,  Alex Jones' Mars' child sex slave conspiracy crappola and other refuse?   It appears to me that our illustrious WSJ author Dubke is appealing for the mainstream media to descend to the same level of the fake news sites.   From this it appears he could sit right alongside other WSJ traders in pro-Trump bunkum such as Holman Jenkins, Kimberly Strassel and Dan Henninger.

Also,  what he's really jaundiced about is that the news organization for which he interns isn't tuned to FOX as opposed to MSNBC.

But this next chestnut really takes the cake - and makes one truly question this kid's basic competence and how he even managed to get an internship at a news organization:

"Every day we hear reports on another bombshell allegation about the Trump administration. Every day more Americans turn their televisions off."

Note the sequence of the two sentences, then their similar starting words "every day". This tells us the frosh is enlisting the  post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. That is,  trying to entice his readers to assume a causal relationship from a merely sequential one: Bombshell allegations about Trump.....Young Americans turning their TVs off.

The sequence is quite evident from the order in which he sets up the two sentences.  After all, it works against his modality to put the second sentence first. He obviously wants the careless reader to say "Oh yeah! Those bombshell allegations cause the young to turn off their televisions!"

But this also elicits the question of whether the intern and soon -to- be Georgetown frosh can even distinguish between an allegation and a fact. He doesn't cite any examples so we are clearly left to ferret them out for him. That is,  those of us who see his WSJ essay as merely a brief for accepting fake news. (Oh, and btw, if you are granted the privilege of writing in the esteemed Wall Street Journal we presume you have on your "big boy pants" so can sustain a proper criticism of what you put to paper.  No kid gloves!)

Let's look at a few of the "bombshells" the mainstream media highlighted this past week.

1) The contradictions of two claims made by Trump, concerning calls received from the head of the Boy Scouts, and the President of Mexico. In the first case, Trump claimed:

"I got a call from the head of the Boy Scouts saying it was the greatest speech ever made to them."

The Boy Scouts responded:  "We are unaware of any such call."

Ouch! A bold faced LIE.  Press Secretary  Sara "Huckleberry" Sanders later admitted no such call was made by the Scouts to lying Trump.   And, btw, if Dubke believes this lying by Trump is small potatoes and a chief executive's truthfulness is of minor import, then he has no business in any news capacity, period. I'd also say he has no business in any foreign service capacity.  But it doesn't stop there. We then beheld:

2)Trump's claim at a cabinet meeting:

"Even the president of Mexico called me. They said for their southern  border very few people are coming because they know they're not going to get through out border. Which is the ultimate compliment."

But, the Mexican Foreign Ministry responded that President Enrique Pena Nieto "has not recently spoken to Donald Trump over the telephone".

So, another lie. Once more these lies disclose Trump a compulsive, pathological liar. This is of utmost importance, because if a president can't be trusted to speak the truth in everyday affairs how the hell can we trust him when a crisis erupts? I for one wouldn't trust a damned word he says if he asserted the North Koreans were planning an attack. Given his background I'd chalk it up to another lie. Why believe a compulsive, pathological liar?

Again, let us note these phone call claims made by Trump were not "allegations" but stone cold fact, although lies.  He did make the claims, the media didn't invent that, it's just that the claims of the calls' content were untrue. The same goes for the transcripts released concerning earlier conversations Trump had in January with President Pena Nieto and Australia's Malcom Turnbull.  Those were actual classified transcripts which some fearsome patriot leaked to show Trump's innate instability and not "allegations".

They each showed a chief executive with impaired speech as well as intellectual disability - a person who has no business being anywhere near nuclear codes.  Dubke may not like this exposure, in fact he may hate it, but ....tough shit. It's the truth.

The intern frosh from Georgetown also claims he "voted for Trump reluctantly" but this is hard to believe given how hard he's sucking up to him now, in his essay.   Indeed he admits:

"Like much of my family since the election I have been drawn toward nontraditional news sources from Fox News to Breitbart."

In other words, the kid gobbles up fake news.. His justification is even more incredible and outright hair raising:

"They may peddle biased and occasionally incorrect information but at least conservative news outlets welcome me with open arms."

And why do you think that is, sonny?  Because of your peerless news savvy and skills?  Or is it that they recognize a fellow  gullible low information moron and dummy?

More revealing still is this next bit of whining:

"I feel marginalized when I watch NBC or CNN or when I read the New York Times and Washington Post."

Why does the kid feel marginalized? If we set aside the possibility that he feels challenged by greater reading demands this leaves  only one logical explanation: young Dubke is afraid of the truth. (And the kid has admitted the news sources he favors "peddle fake news and incorrect information")

Dubke attempts to gain a sense of objectivity for himself by admitting "Donald Trump was a flawed candidate and is a flawed President"  but then seeks to deflect the issue by writing that he'd "like to repeat to journalists what I've been told in school: Show, don't tell".

Wowser! How original!   So Donald Jr's emails - which he himself exposed for all the world to see aren't showing? Trump's claims of phone calls received (which were outright lies) don't make the cut for showing? The transcripts leaked that show Trump's pathetic responses to Nieto and Trunbull aren't showing?

Trump, for god's sake, couldn't keep loyalty with his own AG Jeff Sessions. He humiliated ol' Jeff for most of the week before last, calling him a "loser" and musing about firing him. And doing so in tweets no less!

I would say the "showing" standard to meet the kid's demands was met and then some.

Reading the end of his essay is even more disheartening than the preceding segments. We are asked to believe or accept this new generation of young conservatives is simply too weak, unprepared or lacking in knowledge to take on liberals in hearty, no holds barred debate. They'd rather retire to a corner and whine and pout. He claims most of his peers "don't pay attention to politics" because they "don't want to get into an argument". As for himself:

"The reasons for staying informed are gradually being outweighed by the desire to be accepted...or at least left alone with our world view".

Which is perhaps the most pathetic statement ever made by an incoming college freshman, and one which one hopes Dubke can dispense with by the time he reaches senior year.  What "Mr. Right Snowflake" intern needs to ask himself is why so many millions of youth on the left - like my niece Shayl and sister Rori  - are highly engaged and energized with the resistance.  Say like being involved in the Indivisible Movement, see e.g.

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/karin-kamp/71133/how-the-indivisible-movement-is-fueling-resistance-to-trump

 Why the difference between the left's youth and the right's? Why are the former willing to argue, be politically active and ignore fake news? What is that "magic" ingredient that makes the difference?

Maybe they recognize what the devoted Trumpsters like Dubke do not. That Trump has done absolutely nothing for the average working man or woman. He has instead  championed his own Trump corporate kingdom and the  wealthy.  In other words, his presidency to date is grounded in ignorance, immorality, irrationality and ineptitude.

Maybe, to use Shayl's parlance, it's past time those like Dubke finally "wake up and start facing reality instead of running away from it."

See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/p-m-carpenter/74393/the-light-at-the-end-of-trumps-dark-tunnel

The "Mother Teresa" Hype Knows No Bounds - And Catholics Have Another Fake Saint

Dr. Aroup Chatterjee insists Teresa's claimed wonder works have been oversold to a gullible world.

 Roman Catholics now profess to have a new member added to their pantheon of sainthood.  Mother Teresa, aka, Agnes Gonxhe Bojaxhiu,  was officially declared "St. Teresa of Kolkata" on Sept. 3rd,  by Pope Francis. However, there are those- including me - who call into question this entire Vatican dog and pony show and the ongoing agenda to name new "saints" to take the minds of the faithful off past priest abuse.

Years earlier,  atheist Christopher Hitchens, in his book "Hell's Angel",  had excoriated Bojaxhu as  "a lying, thieving Albanian dwarf”  and taking donations from dictators.  Such charges were, of course, denied by the RC Church though it had a much more difficult time denying she received largesse from the sleaze bag behind the infamous Saving and Loan scandal, Charles Keating. See e.g.

https://howgoodisthat.wordpress.com/2008/07/13/charles-keating-gave-other-peoples-money-to-mother-teresa/

And:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2003/10/mommie_dearest.html

Bruno Maddox, in a review for the New York Times,  described how Hitchens had concluded that Mother Teresa was “less interested in helping the poor than in using them as an indefatigable source of wretchedness on which to fuel the expansion of her fundamentalist Roman Catholic beliefs.”

More to the point, Hitchens' work wasn't totally original but depended heavily on the account of Dr. Aroup Chatterjee.  Chatterjee, an Indian-born British writer, had worked for a year as an intern in one of Teresa’s charitable homes, and documented a catalogue of criticisms against her. In summary, he found fault with the conditions in the facilities of her Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata, which one journalist compared to the photographs she had seen of Nazi Germany’s Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Quoted in a NY Times Profile piece (Aug. 27), Dr. Chatterjee asserted:

"I never saw any nuns in those slums that I worked in. I think it's an imperialist venture of the Catholic Church against an Eastern population, an Eastern city , which has really driven horses and carriages through our prestige and honor.  I just thought this myth had to be challenged."

But was it really a myth, or more a branding exercise? One could make the strong argument it was all about the latter. Indeed, as Douglas Roberts writes in yesterday's UK Independent:

"With everything happening in the world, why is this particular person getting so much posthumous airtime? The Catholic Church, after all,  does not enjoy the same access to our political system as the Church of England, so what is the relevance here? Well, it's quite simple really if Mother Teresa was a celebrity, with a very well-managed brand."

In other words, Bojaxhu like Trump had succeeded in creating and catering to a brand, only this case, a religious brand - that of "serving the wretched of the Earth". Those donations from dictators and the likes of Charles Keating subsidized her misshapen brand much like Trump's numerous bankruptcies subsidized his.  There is a parallel to behold if one makes the effort.

Note the  "Mother Teresa" brand also conveys power, and likely much more than Trump can wield. Teresa-Bojaxhu expostulated often against both birth control and abortion.  This is especially odd in the first case, given how the dire misery and destitution for which she claimed a ministry can be directly traced to overpopulation.  Hence, the claim by many skeptics that she loved poverty, not the poor. See also:

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2015/04/earth-day-alert-biggest-problem-remains.html

Getting back to Dr. Chatterjee, he subsequently traveled the world meeting with volunteers, nuns and authors -researchers who were familiar with the Missionaries of Charity. He conducted over a hundred interviews and heard volunteers describe how workers with very limited medical training administered 10 to 20-year old medicines to patients - while "primitive facilities forced patients to defecate in front of each other" and  "blankets stained with feces were washed in the same sink used to clean dishes."

How could the practices then be anything other than disease -producing? It would have been like a Potemkin care center where hundreds of sick came in, got cursory attention then got sicker - as they also made other patients ill from contact with their bodily effluent (from blankets etc. never properly sanitized the first time).  In other words, Teresa-Bojaxhu  presided over a whole monopoly of sickness and misery  - but used the meticulously cultivated care façade to garner attention and push her zealous moral agenda.

Let's also register that the British medical journal the Lancet published a critical account of the care in Teresa’s facilities in 1994. Then an academic Canadian study a couple of years ago found fault with “her rather dubious way of caring for the sick, her questionable political contacts, her suspicious management of the enormous sums of money she received, and her overly dogmatic views regarding, in particular, abortion, contraception, and divorce.” Multiple accounts say that Teresa’s nuns would baptize the dying and that she had a reputation for proselytizing. Dr.Chatterjee  published his own extremely critical book on Teresa in 2003 which documented a "cult of suffering"  with children "tied to beds and little to comfort patients but aspirin".

But never mind, Teresa-Bojaxhu  and her accomodationists kept the brand going with inflated stories of the success of her care for Calcutta's destitute.  But Dr. Chatterjee's take, in the NY Times piece, is that her "place in the Western canon was enough for some Indians to lionize her as part of an ingrained colonial mindset".

At the same time, he insists Calcuttans "do not associate her with miracles and mumbo jumbo"  just as they "don't associate her with opposition to birth control and abortion."

As for the claimed "miracles" - these appear to have no more than circumstantial support, just as in the case of those claimed for John Paul II, see e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2011/01/sainthood-for-john-paul-ii-unbelievable.html

In Teresa-Bojaxhu's cases, the claims arose from a woman  (Monica Besra) in India whose stomach tumor disappeared and a man in Brazil with brain abscesses who awoke from a coma.

Interestingly,  both credited their dramatic recovery to prayers offered to the nun after her death in 1997.   Neither claimed any direct "hands on" intercession or in -person declarations from Teresa-Bojaxhu that they'd been cured.  In effect, acceptance of their cases as miracles is merely a permutation of the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. That is,  assuming a causal relationship from a merely sequential one. Event Y (in this case an apparent remission or cure) followed Event X (prayers offered to a nun) therefore Event Y must have been caused by Event X. Most people learn to shun such nonsense when they take Logic 101.

Also, in the case of  Monica Besra's alleged "cancer cure" the state health minister has debunked it from the claim's inception and long maintained that Besra had been suffering from a cyst, not a cancerous tumor. The doctors have said she recovered after she received tuberculosis treatment for several months at a government hospital in Balurghat. In other words, if you must attribute the cure to a miracle make sure it's the miracle of modern medical science.

All of this is even more reason why the more advanced sectors of the Roman Catholic Church would like to dispense with the miracle malarkey as well as sainthood and leave the medieval rubbish behind. But their hands are basically tied, because the demographics of the Church have altered so drastically. As the Europeans (and many North Americans) have abandoned the faith, millions in the less developed world - who put lots of emphasis on superstitions and magic - have embraced it. Since the RCs don't wish to lose population power and influence they can no more ditch the mumbo jumbo than they can the opposition to birth control.

A far more potent reason to keep the "sainthood" wheels spinning is to keep the mind of the faithful - as well as outside critics - off the horrific priest sex abuse scandals. Those scandals totally undermined the Church's moral authority and the RCs know it. However, by shifting the accent to morally authoritative squawkers like Teresa-Bojaxhu and earlier, John Paul II, the Church believes it can regain some moral credibility.  I hardly think so, but then I am no longer a Catholic having renounced the baggage of superstitious, medieval rubbish decades ago.  Thus what I think may not matter a whit to hundreds of millions of believers currently awed by the "Saint Teresa of Kolkata" spectacle.

At the same time, it is inevitable that one day the Church will have to change and it will probably come with the arrival of a truly modern Pope who will no longer be hostage to primitive thinking, beliefs and  nonsense. That awakening may take 40 years or 100, but it will happen, you can bank on it.

And what about the campaign of Dr. Chatterjee? He is adamant it will continue even as Western audiences "don't care about whether a third world city's dignity has been hampered by an Albanian nun."  And "so obviously they're more interested in the lies, the charlatans and the frauds going on". But he is intent on getting them to see the whole story, not selective parts to soothe their own wounded souls or fragmented being.  To that end, he says "I will not go away, it's as simple as that."

See also:

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Mother_Teresa

Excerpt:

"Mother Teresa was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. (...) Many more people are poor and sick because of the life of Mother Teresa. Even more will be poor and sick if her example is followed. She was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud, and a church that officially protects those who violate the innocent has given us another clear sign of where it truly stands on moral and ethical questions."