Andy McCarthy is right. He writes today to complain about a hit job in the L.A. Times against Ginni Thomas, long a conservative activist in her own right, who just happens to be the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Ginni Thomas is just launching a new organization dedicated to propounding First Principles, educating younger people about our nation’s founding and its founding values, and mobilizing on behalf of those values in the public sphere. More power to her. But the L.A. Times treats it as a major conflict for… her husband. Read Andy’s whole blog post to see his superb explanation for why the L.A. Times piece is outrageous.
Meanwhile, I’ll go farther. I say that the establishment media is, as a collective entity, intellectually and ethically corrupt. Not just liberal, but intellectually dishonest, often knowingly, to a stupendous degree. So many examples could be given, but here’s one that is apt right now:
There is no standard too duplicitous on which these media folks will act on behalf of their liberal ideology. If Democrats break 214 years of tradition and all prior understandings of how judges get confirmed (in an up-or-down vote), and filibuster judicial nominees almost willy-nilly, a few brave establishment media souls tut-tut a little bit while STILL expressing sympathy for their aims but not their methods. When Republicans try to kill those judicial filibusters, while preserving all other filibusters, the media goes bat-sh*+ about the Republicans’ plans. So it’s worse to act to maintain 214 years of tradition and the spirit of the Constitution than it is to trample that tradition and spirit.
But when the Republicans want to USE the filibuster the way it has now been used for decades, on a major piece of legislation, and the Democrats want to overcome the filibuster by trampling all tradition, suddenly there is only the mildest tut-tutting about the Dems’ trampling of what the media just five years ago had called a sacred insitution. So its okay to abuse the power of the filibuster, against tradition and the spirit of the Constitution, if you are a liberal, but also okay to undermine the power of the filibuster, again against all tradition, if you are a liberal. So now you can’t use the filibuster the way it has always been used, but you can use the filibuster the way it’s never been used — again, only if you are a liberal. And if you fight against those abuses either way, you are a partisan hack.
Okay, back to Ginni Thomas. Here’s hoping that her new venture succeeds beyond even her own wildest imaginings. And here’s hoping that when it does, one of the results is that it bedevils the establishment media at every turn.