J.D. Prose – 6/9/13

This page was last updated on June 10, 2013.

McClelland won’t mince words on Rothfus or anything else; J.D. Prose; Beaver County Times; June 9, 2013.

In the print edition, this column appeared in the op-ed section labeled “ON THE LEFT.” Given Mr. Prose’s body of work and the BCT’s left-leaning positions, did the BCT really think readers didn’t know he’s a “Surly progressive?”

According to his Twitter page, Mr. Prose is a self-described “Surly progressive.” As you read this opinion column and his Twitter “tweets,” keep in mind Mr. Prose wears at least one other hat for the BCT. In addition to being an entertainer/pundit, Mr. Prose is a part-time reporter covering political stories. Ask yourself this. When a pundit gives his political opinions in one part of the paper, can he be trusted to report politics objectively elsewhere in the paper? After all, would a person whose opinion is 1+1 equals 3 report 1+1 really equals 2? Does he have a “Chinese wall” in his head to keep his opinions from bleeding into his reporting? (You may recall NPR claimed it fired Juan Williams for doing exactly what Mr. Prose does.) If it can get worse than that, Mr. Prose has made name-calling and personal attacks a foundation of his columns. If pushed, I’d be willing to bet Mr. Prose would try to excuse his writing by claiming he’s paid to be controversial and stir debate. The problem is, you don’t need to get into name-calling and personal attacks to accomplish those goals.

You can find the archive of my Prose column critiques here.

Below is a critique of portions of this column.

Mr. Prose wrote Erin McClelland is a “self-described ‘social libertarian’” but didn’t say what that means. If Mrs. McClelland – a registered Democrat - is a libertarian of any kind it didn’t show in the subject column and doesn’t show in any of what she’s written on her campaign Facebook page. For example, a libertarian would support the repeal of Obamacare, but Mrs. McClelland referred to “the votes to repeal Obamacare” as “a political gimmick.” As far as I can tell, Mrs. McClelland is just another big-government Democrat. Perhaps Mrs. McClelland or Mr. Prose accidentally said/wrote “libertarian” instead of “liberal” or “progressive.”

“SPYING GAME

“Did we miss something or did our supposed socialist, way-too-liberal President Barack Obama morph into the leader of a right-wing police state that would make Dubya and Darth Cheney jealous? Drones killing Americans and local civilians overseas, prosecutors intimidating reporters with search warrants and possible criminal charges and the government prosecuting whistleblowers while ignoring the actual wrongdoing, collecting phone records of Americans and, now, monitoring real-time Internet traffic, including emails and Google searches for all of us.”

[RWC] Using his own rules, this comment about President Barack Obama means Mr. Prose is a racist.

Mr. Prose must know “right-wing police state” is an oxymoron. “Police state[s]” are on the left, not the right as Mr. Prose would like readers to believe. Examples include Cambodia (Pol Pot), Cuba (Castro), Nazi Germany (Hitler), North Korea, Red China (Mao & successors), the USSR (Stalin & successors), and so on. As you go right from the mythical “middle,” you get increased personal liberty. As you go left, you get closer to dictatorship (either an individual or a group). What makes the left’s attempt to equate the right with “police state” and so on humorous is the left also routinely claims the right is anti-government. Though both representations are untrue, isn’t it pretty difficult to be both anti-government and totalitarian at the same time?

You may have noticed Mr. Prose wrote about “prosecutors intimidating reporters with search warrants and possible criminal charges.” You also probably noted Mr. Prose didn’t mention a reporter’s name. That’s because the reporter is [the evil] Fox News Channel’s chief Washington correspondent, James Rosen. The Rosen warrant also included his parents’ phones. In fairness, early on the Obama administration made it clear it doesn’t believe FNC is a legitimate news outlet so it’s easy to see how President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder didn’t see anything wrong with their actions. <g> Remember, Mr. Holder personally OK’d the search warrant then was caught lying about it. According to CBS News, “Holder appeared before the [House Judiciary] committee on May 15 [2013] and said he wasn’t involved in ‘the potential prosecution’ of a member of the press under the Espionage Act for disclosing information adding, ‘this is not something I’ve ever been involved in, heard of, or would think would be wise policy.’” This means Mr. Holder lied to Congress or OK’d a warrant request that lied about Mr. Rosen to get a judge to issue the warrant. Even then, the DOJ had to engage in judge shopping. Two separate judges denied the warrant as written before the DOJ found a third judge who gave his OK.

Finally, when a lefty like Mr. Prose writes about privacy violations, take the concern with a big grain of salt. When I read a column by Mr. Prose complaining about the financial “full body cavity search” we go through every year when we must detail every aspect of our finances for multiple levels of government (income taxes, property taxes, etc.) and the access to our healthcare records required by socialized healthcare programs like Medicaid, Medicare, Obamacare, SCHIP, et cetera, I’ll consider taking him seriously on the topic of privacy. As soon as lefties can figure out how “collecting phone records of Americans and, now, monitoring real-time Internet traffic, including emails and Google searches for all of us” can help enforce/push some lefty policy/program with a warm and fuzzy name, they will extol the virtues of this kind of widespread snooping.