I missed the Eason Jordan affair.
I heard about it, followed the stories, and read the blogs. But I didn’t feel like commenting here. The reason was that the story was obvious. Senior executives in the mainstream media believe that conservatives are Bible-beating idiots, Republicans raped poor black women so they can later eat the off-spring, and soldiers are murderers who enlist so they can kill without repercusion. Sorry, folks, but that’s how MSM, most college professors, a good major of the population of New York City, and Eason Jordan view us.
Shocked? No. Incredulous, no doubt, you are. So were many, if not most, Americans when Whittaker Chambers outed Alger Hiss and, with him, thousands of other unnamed communists. These communists were part of network of agents maintained by the KGB. Their purpose was to gain influential positions in government, academia, entertainment, and the media in the US. Lower level thugs, mostly members of several unions, such as the Machinists and Longshoremen, supported the senior agents by intimidating anyone who got in their way–including Chambers.
Even though Hiss was convicted of perjury, and even though the process more or less proved that Chambers was a) once a part of this enormous ring of Soviet agents working to undermine the United States and b) there were still thousands like him in the State Department, Department of Defense, media, universities, and even truck stops, most Americans refused to come to terms with the problem.
Men like John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon were equally vigilent against communists at home and abroad. It was a different era. Our national leaders saw and understood the threat to freedom that the Soviets and their American agents presented. When the red left journalists and academics like Edward R. Murrow used the rambunctious Joe McCarthy to discredit the Red Scare, most people quietly accepted assurances that it was just that: a scare. The attacks on McCarthy, orchestrated by pro-Soviets, turned the light of truth away from the communist problem in the United States.
Decades later, Eason Jordan, Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, CNN–shall I go on?–house the decendants of that communist ring. While some are and some are not communists, their ideological bent comes from the same misguided belief system that drove men like Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs to take steps to turn America over to Communist rulers. They believe the vast majority of humanity is too stupid to survive, that there is no God, and that, therefore, it is the duty of brilliant minds to enslave the masses under a benevolent dictatorship that sees to their every need and punishes dangerous individualists who threaten their workers' paradise.
So Eason Jordan is the 21st century’s Alger Hiss. Soon, the media will turn upon those who brought him down and those who brought down Dan Rather and John Kerry and Al Gore and the United Nations–that last, best hope for totalitarianism. They attack as viciously as they did the anti-communists of the fifties and sixties. Their thirst for vengence will have no end.
Who else is on this story?
Blogs for Bush declares Victory.
Michelle Malkin has an excellent retrospective of the affair worth reading and keeping.
Dean Esmay says Jordan’s resignation effectively gets the MSM off the hook for harboring the kind of people they harbor.
Joe Gandelman has taken his time and produced a fantastic roundup of blogger on Jordan. Says Joe:
And - significantly it also underlines the slow-as-a-turtle role of the mainstream broadcast news departments these days. They were not even players in this story.
Hmmm. I’m not so sure. The fact that the MSM refused to cover a story about one of its own seems that they learned the dangers of cannibalism during Memogate. Sometimes silence is a story.
Missed The American Mind. A roundup of humor on the Eason affair.