Blow Job

Every other Saturday, the Op-Ed page of the New York Times includes an opinion piece by one Charles M. Blow. The first of these opinion pieces appeared from nowhere in April of 2008. Mr. Blow was a complete unknown; his opinion pieces never include the usual one-sentence anchor tag that tips the reader to the author’s expertise and political associations. Each of his opinions is accompanied by a bold graphic – a bar graph or a pie graph or some other honking grey-scale gewgaw.

The persistent absence of any identifying information about Mr. Blow in such a prestigious publication piqued my curiosity. Who is Charlie Blow?

An Internet search revealed that Charlie joined the Times in 1994 as a graphics editor; he graduated to the position of graphics director. He’s a graduate of the historically all-black Grambling State University in Louisiana; he was a graphic artist at The Detroit News before he showed up at the Times. Grambling gave Charlie a B.A. degree in “mass communication.”

When the Times caught wind that Charlie Blow had a gift for invective, they let him loose to produce bi-weekly hit pieces for their Op-Ed page. Each of Charlie’s brickbats would be accompanied by one of Charlie’s graphic creations. These somber and sometimes ominous pictorials are intended to give his opinions “gravitas” or heft – what a cynical propagandist would call “blinding the suckers with science,” or the illusion of science.

Take, for example, Charlie Blow’s recent toxic confection titled “An Article of Faith,” in which he stigmatized Americans who are critical of Barack Obama’s budget-busting super-colossal entitlement programs as hyper-emotional, illogical, mental low-watts.

Mr. Blow begins with a few facts that he can’t conceal:

“Since signing the health care reform bill, President Obama has been traipsing about the country trying to sell it. It’s not really working for him.

“According to a CBS News poll released Friday, President Obama’s approval rating on health care sank to a personal low: 34 percent. (His overall approval rating in the poll was also a new low for him: 44 percent.)

“This is in large part because of Republican recalcitrance. The left loves him. The right not so much. Actually, not at all. According to a Quinnipiac University poll released last week, Obama’s job approval rating among Republicans was a measly 9 percent. On health care, his approval rating was an even-more-measly 7 percent.” (New York Times, 4/3/10)

After that, the spin begins. Charlie is an Obama True Believer; the only reason why the saintly Barack is not adored by everyone must be because “The Apostles of anger in their echo chamber of fallacies have branded him the enemy.” Mr. Blow frets that, “This has now become an article of faith. Obama isn’t just the enemy of small government and national solvency. He’s the enemy of liberty.”

Please note that the man with a degree in “mass communication” has just downgraded three verifiable facts to the diminished status of “articles of faith.” It is a fact that Barack Obama is wildly expanding the reach of government bureaucracies; it is a fact that Barack Obama has indentured our republic to foreign and unfriendly purchasers of our preposterous and exploding national debt and it is a fact, Mr. Blow, that using the menace of IRS persecution to compel American citizens to purchase the products of private insurance vendors, merely because they are citizens, is a hideous imposition on our liberty. Such an imposition is unconstitutional; it is illegal; it is obnoxious. It is a stink in the nostrils of every freedom-loving patriot in America. If Mr. Obama’s agenda does not have the wholehearted support of the citizens of America, then Mr. Obama should cease imposing his overblown and bewilderingly complicated and ruinously expensive agenda on the people of the United States.

At this point Charlie Blow does something sly and disgusting – he deliberately confuses his readers with some verbal slight-of-hand – he creates a transitional moment of confusion; Charlie says, “The current fight for the soul of this country” is “not just a tug of war between left and right. It’s a struggle between the mind and the heart, between evidence and emotions, between reason and anger, between what we know and what we believe.”

This feels like the truth until you realize that Charlie Blow’s premise is that all reason and evidence are on the side of Obamaist progressivism and every objection to Obama-style progressivism is, to Charlie Blow’s way of thinking, mere emotion, anger, belief and “heart.”

The exact inversion of Blow’s premise is closer to the truth. The ObamaCare legislation is gargantuan; it is unknowable; it was passed into law by a single political party whose legislators did not read its text and do not now understand the consequences of the legislation that they have made the law of our land. So which side is really wallowing in faith-based fantasy, Mr. Blow?

It is here that Charlie Blow, Mister Magna cum Laude from Grambling State University, moves in and flashes us his most brilliant intellectual presentation:

“This conflict was captured in a tit-for-tat between Obama and Rush Limbaugh. In an interview with CBS this week, Obama complained about the ‘vitriol’ coming from the likes of Limbaugh: “I think the vast majority of Americans know that we’re trying hard, that I want what’s best for the country.”

“Limbaugh shot back on Friday, “I and most Americans do not believe President Obama is trying to do what’s best for the country.”

“And there it was. Omama’s language focused on what people ‘know,’ or should know. He seems to find comfort in the empirical nature of knowledge. It’s logical. Limbaugh’s language focused on what he thinks people ‘believe.’ Beliefs are a more complicated blend of facts, or lies, and faith. And, they can exist beyond the realm of the rational.

“This focus on faith has allowed people like Limbaugh to mislead and manipulate large swaths of the right.”

This is Charlie’s “gottcha” moment; this is what Charlie Blow considers evidence worthy of consideration. It’s twaddle; it’s rubbish. Either of these men could have swapped the word “know” for the word “believe” to the same effect. When Obama says “I think” he is saying “I believe” because he is talking about something that he can not possibly know for certain. These two men are indulging in a slap fight. None of this superficial prattle is fit stuff to support any meaningful argument.

After this, Charlie Blow blows more smoke:

“ According to another Quinnipiac poll released last week, Republicans were far more likely than Democrats to say that they follow public affairs most of the time. But how? They listen to people like Limbaugh, and they’re more likely than others to watch Fox News.

“But invectives are not information. For example, a poll by the Pew Research Center found that most Republicans say that they still don’t understand how the new health care reform will affect them and their family.”

Charlie wants you to believe that there is a contradiction here when, in fact, there is no contradiction. Repeated studies of Rush Limbaugh’s audience have shown them to be the best informed and the most politically-aware audience in America; they are eager for information and Limbaugh is one of their chosen sources of information. Fox News may be another of their chosen sources. Both Limbaugh and Fox cite their sources and conduct on-the-air interviews with political luminaries and recognized experts. Their most powerful tools of persuasion are recorded statements by militant progressives. These same people are also avid readers of magazines, newspapers and books . . . lots and lots of books.

Please note: The New York Times refuses to offer its readers reviews of books by conservative authors. An obscure novel that sells 5,000 copies can top the Times’ “Best Seller” list after a gushing review by the Times, but a book such as Mark Levin’s “Liberty & Tyranny” can reach the top of the Times non-fiction list with no review and sell a million copies. This happens again and again and the liberals express their bewilderment again and again. It’s no mystery: conservatives are engaged politically-aware readers.

Since Charlie Blow himself chose to cite the Pew Research Center as a reliable source of trustworthy information, I sought Pew’s data on Rush Limbaugh’s audience. Here’s a bit of what Pew had to say:

“But not all news sources are created equal. The audiences for different sources vary greatly in how much they know about what’s going on, a consequence both of the kinds of people who rely on each type of medium and how much they may learn from specific sources.

“Internet news sources, National Public Radio, news magazines, and Rush Limbaugh’s radio show have the best educated audiences, with each of these having at least 36% of their regular readers and listeners having graduated from college.”

Pew had more to say:

“The fact that a particular news source’s audience is very knowledgeable does not mean that people learned all that they know from that source. As noted earlier, some news sources draw especially well-educated audiences who are keenly interested in politics. Because of their education and life experiences, these individuals have more background information and may be better able to retain what they see in the news, regardless of where they see it.

“Similarly, the news-hungry public tends to visit many outlets . . . an average of more than seven separate sources for the regular audiences of each of these . . . Well-educated people do gravitate to particular places, but they also make use of a much wider range of news sources than do the less informed.”

It took me less than a minute to research these facts; it would have taken Charlie Blow less than a minute to research these facts. But Charlie didn’t want the facts to disturb his comfy faith-based fantasies, his beliefs, about conservatives.

The folks Charlie Blow calls “Republicans,” who are really conservatives, are well informed. The fact that these better-informed citizens don’t understand the thousands of pages of legislation that define ObamaCare, pages deliberately written in obscure legalese, is not a reflection on their intelligence; it is simply a demonstration that even the most intelligent citizens cannot fathom Barack’s insanely encrypted blueprint for America.

This legislation will require ten thousand pages of clarifying regulatory memoranda; it will provoke a thousand courtroom battles. But Charlie Blow and the ever self-important New York Times “just know” that the only reason conservatives aren’t thrilled with Obama’s anti-constitutional impositions on our God-given human rights is because conservatives have unquestioning “faith” in radio personalities. This must have been the manner in which the French aristocracy dismissed those pesky French Republicans, utterly clueless of what lay ahead.

With all the pomposity of the Sun King himself, Charlie Blow, Mister Magna cum Laude from Grambling, flipped the peasants one final barb: “They don’t know what it means, but they believe it’s bad.”

And yet, when these same dimwits are asked why they came to a Tea Party gathering they suddenly become fountains of coherent reasoning about why quadrupling our national debt is a bad thing, why presidential commands to purchase the products of private vendors is unconstitutional and why hiring sixteen thousand new IRS agents to enforce ObamaCare, but not a single new doctor, is a vision of a future they don’t want to experience.

When all is said and done, it doesn’t matter whether the majority of American’s “understand” ObamaCare or not. It is enough that the majority of Americans have said that they do not want ObamaCare and do not want to finance ObamaCare with their earnings. In a republic where the elected legislators and the elected executives were truly representatives of the people, the mere desire of the people to crush ObamaCare would be enough to squash it like a bug.