the Devil's best trick

"the devil's best trick is to persuade
you that he doesn't exist"

Have you ever heard this phrase?

the odds are you have - it's often on the lips
of radical Christian preachers and other denizens
of the Conservative  world, often when they are speaking about some nebulous new "liberal/leftist/progressive" nefariousness afoot somewhere
in the land.

Given the strict moral commandments so many
of these people allegedly live by, I wonder if they know who they are citing...

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The original version reads:

«Mes chers frères, n'oubliez jamais,
quand vous entendrez vanter le progrès des lumières, que la plus belle des ruses du diable
est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas!»

...which translates thusly:

"My dear brothers, never forget, when you
hear the progress of enlightenment vaunted,
that the devil's best trick is to persuade
you that he doesn't exist!"

It first appeared in France (duh) on February 7, 1864, in the writings of Charles Baudelaire.


Now seen as one of the giants of French literature, back in 1864 he was seen as a radical libertine even by his friends. these  included writers like Victor Hugo and Balzac, painter Édouard Manet, composer Franz Liszt and other culturati of the times.

as a young man, he began frequenting prostitutes  and his muse was Jeanne Duval, a famous Creole courtesan in Paris.

his best-known work is a collection of poems
called "Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil)", that hit the unsuspecting streets of Paris 1857.

among the poems about sex and death, as seen through a prism of lesbianism, sacred and profane love, metamorphosis, melancholy, the corruption of the city, lost innocence, the oppressiveness of living... and wine, is one called "The Litanies of Satan".

some thought the poems brilliant, but most did not. one major daily said "Everything in it which is not hideous is incomprehensible, everything one understands is putrid". Baudelaire was arrested
and convicted of creating an offense against public morals and some of his poems were banned by the government.

then as now, censorship can be very good for business and he continued to write and publish widely over the years. He also continued to smoke opium, take laudanum, drink and visit whores
until dying in poverty in 1867.

a first edition of Fleurs du mal now
goes for about $40,000.

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Baudelaire was, in word and deed, the antithesis
of someone conservative Moral Crusaders to be quoting around town but more than a taste for irony that has him on my mind these
days...

because if the devil's greatest trick is convincing you that he doesn't exist, then perhaps god's greatest trick is convincing you he does.

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Consider Sarah Palin's recurring use
of the "lamestream media".

She first used it in 2009 on Sean Hannity’s radio show- Palin said that “some on the left, that lamestream media, they’re contradicting what I wrote in the book.” Hannity jumped in to ask, “did you say lamestream media?”

“Yeah, lamestream,” Palin responded. “They are contradicting those facts that I laid out regarding what Reagan had to say.”


As in so many things Palinese, she didn't come
up with this herself. It first turned up in print in 10 years earlier, in the Waukegan News-Sun... but certainly Ms. Palin brought it to a wider audience.

two years later, it's an assumed truth among
the parroting classes in the US and Canada. The "the lamestream media" is seen as a sewage system of “journalism”.

FOR INSTANCE

Your blogger stood beside a retired New York City police captain for a few minutes.  He was well-versed in crowd counting and estimated the group to be between 65,000 - 70,000. 
Meanwhile, the "lamestream" media was calling the crowd at only 1,500 - 2,000.  They were declaring that Americans were happy with the bill and wanted it to pass.

Newsweek is one of the lamestream media mouthpieces for Barack Obama and the Democrats. Given that this periodical is a firm supporter of the liberal/progressive destruction of America it is quite surprising to see this cover... If Obama isn’t actually any of these things then it means Newsweek is saying he is not the President.




Two recent stories will probably not garner much coverage (if any) by the lamestream media (NY Times, Wash Post, CNN/CBS/NBC/ABC/MSNBC et al).  Why? Because they don’t fit the leftist narrative.





They are now LAME - this means Fox, Limbaugh, Hannity, Malkin, Free Republic and Drudge are the MAIN STREAM MEDIA. The paradigm has now completed it’s shift!
Use the term “Lame Stream Media” anytime you can and pass it on!

...and in Canada...

You just know that the Left and Lamestream Media will try to claim he's "right-wing" and will try to blame Sarah Palin, the Tea Party and "vitriolic rhetoric" and such for what happened.


It has been evident for some time that the liberal LSM (Lame Stream Media)—what Glenn Beck calls the “Fringe Media”—are out of step, out of line, and out of time.

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Voila! Certain people - and there are many of them - have been persuaded "lamestream media" exist. All media that don't agree with them and tell them things they think they know already are "lamestream".

Such is the road from some ones' or twos' opinion to received truth. It is now a fact of life among those who prefer that others do their thinking for them, and stitch it into some kind of spiritual blankie to comfort them when the sun goes down each night.

... and it gets worse.

to be continued

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