Pinheads and Patriots (5 page)

THE TRUE PINHEADS
of the world can be found in the precincts of betrayal, abuse of power, apathy toward the suffering of others, greed, envy, and exploitation of the powerless. As I've written, we all are Pinheads on occasion, but if we live without standards, we risk being Pinheads all the time.

Most of the people that I know are good people, and many of them have trouble understanding the cruelty that we all witness in our lives. How can so-and-so do that? they ask. Well, the answer is kind of simple and very important. Many human beings put their own self-interest ahead of everything else. If they want something, they'll do what they have to do to get it. When confronted with their heinous activities, the self-involved often retreat into a dark world. The religious writer Sarah Young puts it this way: “Man's tendency is to hide from his sin, seeking refuge in the darkness.
There he indulges in self-pity, denial, self-righteousness, blaming, and hatred.”

Out of that emotional grouping, rationalizations are easy to form. Excuses for bad behavior are everywhere. Look, I do this myself. Whenever I commit some stupid or sinful act, my first instinct is to attempt to explain away my Pinheaded behavior. But I've come to the point in my life where I stop that nonsense quickly. We are all sinners; to spend time trying to justify the sin just makes it worse. Own it and try not to do it again. If you have to make restitution, make it. True Pinheads will never get that simple rule. That's why they are true Pinheads.

NEWSWORTHY CEOS?

Sometimes, the Pinheads manage to achieve power, which makes them especially annoying and sometimes even dangerous. Here's a vivid example. There's a media guy named Jeff Zucker who runs the National Broadcasting Corporation. Early in his career, Zucker was a creative type. As a producer, he helped build
The Today Show
into the powerhouse it remains today. From very early on, Zucker had a good relationship with Katie Couric, which many speculate helped him rise in the company.

Then, as often happens, Zucker was promoted and given immense power by General Electric boss Jeffrey Immelt, whom I flayed in my previous book. GE owns NBC, and Immelt allowed Zucker to run wild, nearly ruining the NBC brand and absolutely devastating many lives.

Zucker is the man who scheduled Jay Leno at 10:00
P.M
. because NBC's prime-time lineup was so weak, thanks to Zucker, that he had little else to put on the air. Poor Jay. He was thrown up against high-rated dramas like
CSI
and got his butt kicked all over the place.

Desperate to save his own butt, Zucker put Leno back on at
11:30, which resulted in a very public dispute and the ultimate firing of Conan O'Brien. Because of the chaos that Zucker imposed, hundreds of people were adversely affected. But Zucker's the kind of guy who is in it for the power, so if you have to die (figuratively speaking) for his sake, then you have to die. As long as his rear end is saved, everyone else is expendable. That, of course, is standard management behavior in corporate America; it's not unique to Zucker.

But what does make Jeff Zucker a monumental Pinhead is what he did at NBC News. The culture of that place had been liberal for years, but Tom Brokaw and Brian Williams tamped the lefty stuff down on the air.
The Today Show
was mostly Left but, again, they weren't in your face about it, at least not most of the time.

NBC News, however, developed a big problem. Their cable news outfit, MSNBC, was failing even after hundreds of millions of dollars had been invested in it. NBC's cable news partner, the Microsoft Corporation, was appalled. After all, Fox News, which started up a few months after MSNBC in 1996, was far more successful, making tons of money. So what the heck was going on? Microsoft wanted to know.

Emerging from his lair, Jeff Zucker had no answers. Then, kind of suddenly, good fortune smiled on him in the form of an energetic politician named Barack Obama.

Sensing some destiny in play, Zucker and his underlings decided to drop any pretense of reporting the news and get into the business of using MSNBC to promote left-wing causes—causes like the candidacy of one Senator Obama.

It is worth pausing here to deal with an inevitable criticism of my analysis. Some Americans, as mentioned before, believe that Fox News is an arm of the Republican machine, that my employer is in business to promote the Grand Old Party. I have always found that belief strange. Yes, FNC has a number of conservative commentators who certainly vote Republican most of the time. It is also true that we have hired guys like Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove to do political
analysis. But we also have committed Democrats like Lanny Davis, Geraldine Ferraro, and Joe Trippi on board. In addition, you may remember that I and a number of other FNC commentators hammered John McCain during the campaign. In fact, as I recalled earlier, the senator loathed coming on the
Factor,
because we gave him no quarter. I asked him the hardest questions I could think of.

That was quite a contrast to Zucker's operation, which openly rooted for Barack Obama to win the election. I mean, it was stunning to watch. The network's new ad campaign, inviting viewers to “experience the power of change,” echoing Obama's own campaign message, was just the tip of things. Because MSNBC has no news correspondents, it relies on NBC network correspondents for information. So people like Andrea Mitchell and Lester Holt, two experienced reporters, had to appear on a network that was actually campaigning for the Democratic candidate. That had never happened before in media history. You have to hope that God in heaven protected Chet Huntley and John Chancellor from seeing that abomination.

Clearly, I'm not the only one to call out Jeff Zucker. Here the NBC Universal CEO fires back at comedian Jon Stewart, saying it was “unfair” and “absurd” for the funnyman to question CNBC's coverage of the financial news.
REUTERS
Photographed by Shannon Stapleton

But it gets worse. Not only did MSNBC programming violate every journalistic rule of fairness, Zucker also hired a bunch of guttersnipes who proceeded to smear Republicans and conservatives by launching vicious personal attacks. Broadcast journalism had never seen anything like this. There were absolutely no rules. These hired verbal assassins took rank propaganda from Far Left Web sites and broadcast it as truth. They used vile gossip and innuendo to smear John McCain, Sarah Palin, and anyone who supported them. Disgraceful doesn't even begin to cover it.

All the while, Jeff Zucker was at the helm. He's quite a guy.

During the presidential campaign, MSNBC's prime time got a small increase in audience, primarily people heavily invested in Barack Obama. But a year after Mr. Obama's election, MSNBC had lost most of that audience and was once again a ratings and editorial embarrassment.

No decent executive (or person, for that matter) would allow what passes for programming at MSNBC. Yes, the individuals who traffic in the personal attacks are responsible for their slander. But the architect of the smear machine is Jeff Zucker, who should watch out, because if the old saying is true, what goes around, comes around.

EPIDEMIC NONSENSE

There are a number of folks such as Minister Louis Farrakhan, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Bill Moyers, Michael Savage, David Duke, et al. who are Pinheads and there's no doubt about it. But these are obvious, easy targets that don't much advance the cultural dialogue.

I must say, however, that Farrakhan sometimes amuses me. I don't mean his insane ramblings about “wicked Jews.” That kind of vile stuff is simply unacceptable. But occasionally the guy is so out there that I can't help but laugh at the insanity. Yes, you can call me a Pinhead for doing this.

But here's a good example of the stuff I'm talking about. Remember the brief swine flu scare in 2009? Well, Farrakhan seized upon that to say, “The Earth can't take 6.5 billion people. We just can't feed that many. So what are we going to do? Kill as many as you can. We have to develop a science that kills them and makes it look as though they died from some disease.”

It looks like Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan is making a point of saying something Pinheaded again here!
Associated Press/AP
Photographed by Paul Beaty

So according to Minister Farrakhan, the swine flu is some man-made doomsday bug.

The man's a complete Pinhead. Can you believe thousands of people pay money to hear his speeches? Every one of those people—every one of them—is a Pinhead, too.

LEGALLY BLIND

We have witnessed some confounding Pinhead moves in our time, but every once in a while, something happens in America that makes me doubt my country, which is painful for any Patriot. It's kind of like what the priest pedophilia scandal did to some Roman Catholics: it made them question the validity of their own church.

On March 3, 2006, Marine Lance Corporal Matthew Snyder, just twenty years old, was killed in Iraq when the Humvee he was riding in went off the road and rolled over. A week later, the funeral for Matthew was held in his hometown of Westminster, Maryland.

Outside the church, a group of insane fanatics calling themselves the Westboro Baptist Church picketed. They chanted ugly things about Matthew and other American military people killed in action. They claimed that God directly caused Matthew's death because the United States “accepts” gay people. They believe that the deity is punishing America because homosexuality is “tolerated.”

This vile group has been around for years, but this time someone stood up to them. Matthew's father, Albert, filed a federal lawsuit against Westboro's leader, Fred Phelps, and his organization. Mr. Snyder stated that the group intentionally inflicted emotional distress on him and his family, invaded their privacy, and was guilty of a civil conspiracy.

A trial commenced, and in October 2007 a jury found Phelps and his “church” guilty, awarding the Snyder family nearly $11 million in damages. The judge in the trial, Richard Bennett, lowered the verdict to $5 million, but a satisfying judgment was in hand. Not for long, though.

Westboro appealed to the Fourth Circuit in Virginia, and three judges—Robert King, Dennis Shedd, and Allyson Duncan—over-turned the guilty verdict on the grounds that what the fanatics did wasn't bad enough! The judges wrote, “Although reasonable people may disagree about the appropriateness of the Phelps protest, this
conduct simply does not satisfy the heavy burden required for the tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress under Maryland law.”

Are you kidding me? These judges believe there could be a debate about the
appropriateness of the protest
? Really? Just what exactly is appropriate about screaming that God murdered a marine because his country won't persecute homosexuals? Who exactly is going to defend that position…Satan?

The legal travesty those judges created is what I mean when I talk about being
PINHEADS
. Amazingly, two of these judges were appointed by President George W. Bush, so they're not left-wing loons. They just live in a world of words on paper. Lawbook Land. They are incapable of understanding true justice because they believe it occurs only in word form. Can you imagine any intelligent person writing that there could be an honest debate over the vicious actions of the Westboro nuts? It's impossible in the real world. But not in Lawbook Land.

Then the judges made the awfulness even worse.

Stunning all fair-minded people, they ruled that the Snyder family actually had to pay the Westboro loons more than $16,000 in court costs. At first I thought the judges had been compelled to do that by law after overturning a judgment. But no, it was a discretionary decision. On the
Factor,
attorney and Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly sided with the judges, explaining that it is “customary” for the loser of an appeal to pay the winner. Megyn further explained that Al Snyder was late in objecting to the judge's ruling (Snyder's attorney denies that), so you can't blame the judges.