An authoritarian attack on the free media would try to magnify such a lapse. It's a certainty that print and electronic media will make mistakes and commit abuses.

I'm not following you here as it relates to one example I offered.
How did an authoritative attack on free media cause CNN to collude with the Clinton campaign by giving her the questions to the second (I believe it was that one) presidential debate?
What existed in the swamp prior to that? Or did no such political/media swamp exist at the time?

Excuse me ant, but please try a bit harder to read what you are commenting on.

There is a small difference between authoritarian and authoritative.

Making dumb mistakes like that once may be regarded as a misfortune, but doing it too much looks like carelessness.

ant wrote:

An authoritarian attack on the free media would try to magnify such a lapse. It's a certainty that print and electronic media will make mistakes and commit abuses.

I'm not following you here as it relates to one example I offered.
How did an authoritative attack on free media cause CNN to collude with the Clinton campaign by giving her the questions to the second (I believe it was that one) presidential debate?
What existed in the swamp prior to that? Or did no such political/media swamp exist at the time?

No, my remarks don't address the matter of the Clinton campaign cribbing debate questions, so I should have deleted that part of your post. My focus was the claim that CNN's error destroys the credibility of the media. That seems like saying that a scientist being caught fudging data destroys the credibility of science.

To talk about "the swamp," we need to first define what is meant by the word in this context. Since I don't use the term, that would be up to you.

Litwitlou wrote:

geo wrote:

ant wrote:This all seems to have collapsed, particularly with once trusted sources like CNN which has been caught red-handed circulating news not established as fact, and later retracting the item.

Personally, I don't like CNN. It seems to pander to the lowest common denominator and is apt to sensationalize the news. This might be true of any 24-hour news channel, which must fill in all that space with something. The goal is increase viewership more than to accurately report the news.

I would say print media is a better choice for getting the news. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal are both excellent.

Disney World's Trump robot target of screaming rant. Is there any place that's safe from leftist insanity?

Fox News 12/31/2017
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/12/ ... anity.html

Litwitlou, why do you post a link to a Fox News article that has absolutely nothing to do with my comments (about print media)? Do you have anything to say, or does Fox News govern what you think?

Except that in a weird way, the Fox News article does illustrate my point. There are credible sources of news and there are more entertainment outlets like CNN and Fox News. This particular piece about a robot Trump at Disney is not in the least relevant or important to anyone. However, it does promote the right-wing narrative about "leftist hysteria" though, which feeds the Fox news viewership.

That Fox news article is about one comedian screaming at a robot. But that's all it takes to fire up the Voyeuristic Busy-Butt Outrage Machine (Tm) and attempt to transform that into national hysteria about "leftist hysteria." You have probably seen many other examples of the Voyeuristic Busy-Butt Outrage Machine with stories like "My kid did such and so and JUST LOOK at what the teacher wrote back to my child!" Etc...

Back to the original topic, President Trump is not draining the swamp in Washington. The legal system is doing that tough work for him with indictments against four prominent members of his administration (and likely more on the way).

I guess The Swamp is a flexible term, according to the particular elements one wants drained away. Would the presence of more billionaires in positions of power be a Swamp indicator? Then we can say that Trump has probably not pulled the plug. Would cutting the numbers of federal employees show progress in draining? Then we could say he is succeeding. But I still want to know exactly what a person means when he invokes The Swamp. Personally, I hate the term just for its bias against swamps, which are wonderful places we should be guarding against drainage.

The swamp is a breeding place for mosquitos (bureaucracy). The swamp in California is in desperate need of being drained, far more so than the federal swamp. I've always though that states were worse than federal, as bad as federal is.

I see the Swamp as the establishment, meaning career politicians who are more interested in their re-elections than in working for the people. As such they're beholden to corporate interests. Trump may genuinely want to "drain the swamp" as it were, but it seems that he's only substituting one reptile for another. It's like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse.

There's a good conservative case to be made for reducing government bureaucracy, whether state or federal (or local, for that matter). Government is so much more than elected officials. But the case needs to be made from a base of knowledge about what needs to be restructured or cut. It can't be just "government is bad, gov't is the swamp," because most of government is necessary. We might not think it is, but when it leaves then we find out what we're missing. This is where the libertarian delusion comes in. In the name of liberty the libertarians claim that regulations are evil and make us less free. No society has ever tried that approach, though; there are no successful examples to point to.

What might the effect be of the drastic cuts to the State Department, to name one department that's been targeted? The world is complicated and bears a lot of watching. We won't necessarily feel the effects of cuts immediately, if they were made without due consideration.

Dwill wrote:There's a good conservative case to be made for reducing government bureaucracy, whether state or federal (or local, for that matter). Government is so much more than elected officials. But the case needs to be made from a base of knowledge about what needs to be restructured or cut.

I agree. The status quo appears to be that most new bureaucracy includes provisions to garner votes that benefit (or at least limit the damage to) special interests. Meanwhile any removal of bureaucracy removes the effective parts while leaving the provisions.

Whether we shrink or grow, we do so to the benefit of the few and mighty. Neither base side of the political spectrum truly gets what they want, because the details of the change are dictated by special interests.

Even though the analogy has drifted from the original (mosquito reduction), I agree with Geo. We need to drain the swamp to see and purge the alligators. Campaign finance reform is the best place to start.