The quaint notion that “partisanship ends at the water’s edge” continues to plague a few journalists and other inconsequential figures as the GOP does their best impression of Aristophanes’ sophists in The Frogs.
Administration Official Criticizes Israeli Ambassador Over Netanyahu Visit
Julie Hirschfeld Davis / New York TimesWASHINGTON — The Obama administration, after days of mounting tension, signaled on Wednesday how angry it is with Israel that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accepted Republican leaders’ invitation to address Congress …
John Boehner told a blatant lie and then followed up with a nonsensical one to cover the first:
Invitation to Netanyahu to address U.S. Congress: When bipartisan means partisan
BY PATRICIA ZENGERLE
WASHINGTON Fri Jan 23, 2015 6:29pm EST(Reuters) – When U.S. House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner, a Republican, jolted Washington this week by inviting Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress, his office said it had been done “on behalf of the bipartisan leadership.”
[…]
The invitation was worded that way, a Boehner spokesman said on Friday, because “Boehner is the Speaker of the whole House, elected by the whole House.” Boehner was re-elected as the chamber’s leader on Jan. 6 with 216 votes, all from Republicans, out of the 435 voting members of the House of Representatives.
I have waited a week to see if anyone in the so-called “media” of “journalists” would pay attention to Journalism 101:
Read Boehner’s formal letter of invitation here.
The problem is that Boehner — no matter how you might try to parse his incredibly lame excuse — ALSO pretends to speak for the entirety of US Senate, which did NOT elect him, and did not, in “bipartisan” fashion, elect Boehner as spokesman for Congress by any stretch of the imagination whatsoever!
I realize that a sophist of the legal persuasion could eventually somehow pretend that this lie is, in fact, the truth, but that would be to give the lie to any notion of truth whatsoever.
There IS such a thing as truth and falsehood, else no law works, and Boehner is retroactively consigned to irrelevance.
The question is– aside from the Logan Act, which, while not probably actionable, STILL strongly indicates that only the President makes foreign policy — can one lying leader of one Congressional House, invite a foreign head of state, while lying about his authority to do so, without our national press noticing or much caring that it is a blatant falsehood that walks right up to the front porch of treason and sedition and rings the doorbell?
The answer seems to be ‘yes.’
Here is Brent Bozell’s oxymoronically and Orwellian-entitled “Accuracy In Media”:
Iran, Obama, Boehner and Netanyahu
Caroline Glick — January 29, 2015… Just as the invitation to Netanyahu was a bipartisan invitation, so concerns about Obama’s policy toward Iran’s nuclear program are bipartisan concerns…
There.
The article is framed by THIS in-house
(and contextually hilarious)
advertisement for their “truth” as
opposed to anyone else’s. This is a
classical sign of a cult, by the by.
Question answered by fiat:
It is “bipartisan” because we SAY it is “bipartisan” and not because any notion of “fact” or “truth” enters into the equation.
Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
Or, more likely, Quod Ararat Demonstrandum, roughly translated as “False? Noah way it’s false!”
Why am I the only journalist in America who is bothered by this?
[Leaving aside the rest of the toxic brew of racism, sedition, treason, calumny and betrayal of agreed-upon protocols for foreign policy dating back to at least 1799, that is.]
And shouldn’t journalists and politicians be asking the Israeli government why they are accepting an invitation based on clearly false pretenses?
My bad for giving a damn, I guess.
Mea culpa. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.
Courage.
Pinocchio: nevenm / Shutterstock.com
A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog, His Vorpal Sword (no spaces) dot com.