Briefly Noted: A Humor Break

Two especially humorous items today.

First: Progs who just don't get it. 

WHO advisory board member: I'm a progressive Dem who was called a 'right-wing nut' over Wuhan lab leak theory

Jamie Metzl slammed Peter Daszak's 2020 Lancet letter condemning lab leak theory as 'scientific propaganda'

Jamie Metzl sounds for all the world like a prototypical prog. If you don't believe me, check him out at Wikipdedia or at his profile page. Whatever else those pages suggest to you, he's probably a natively very smart guy. He's a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and previously worked for Zhou Baiden and the Clinton Admin. With that background, you have to wonder: Exactly what about the Progressivism doesn't he get?

Obviously there's a disconnect somewhere, because he went and got himself labeled as a "right wing conspiracy theorist." You can imagine the amount of heartburn he--a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a member of WHO's advisory board--is suffering! It's to the point that he actually appeared on Fox and Friends, seemingly the only platform willing to grant him an audience. And he still doesn't seem to understand what hit him--as if pleading his case on Fox will somehow restore him to the good graces of World Progressivism.

Here's how he responds to a question about Peter Daszak's orchestration of the Lancet statement, the statement that, 'Hey, that Covid thing was totally not engineered in a lab--are you crazy?' That's the statement that's now being revealed as complete bullsh*t, basically coerced from scientists who were on the government grant take. 

The clueless Metzl went on Fox to protest his Prog credentials jproceeds to congratulate his right wing hosts on defending science against the progressive Left and generally getting the whole story absolutely correct. Then Metzl goes on to compound matters by naively claiming that science--as practiced in the 21st century--isn't about politics:

Corruption Of Fourth Estate On Full Display

Fourth Estate? Wikipedia helpfully explains:

The term Fourth Estate or fourth power refers to the press and news media both in explicit capacity of advocacy and implicit ability to frame political issues.

And Epoch Times offers a devastating example of the perhaps unprecedented degree of corruption we've witnessed over the past several years. The article explains that, for the second time in the same number of days the "venerable" AP has had to correct demonstrably false information that it has attempted to foist on news consumers:

The Associated Press deleted a tweet that pushed false information about President Donald Trump on Nov. 20, the second time in two days the wire agency has been forced to significantly amend its reporting on Trump. 

The agency, also known as the AP, wrote in a post on Twitter: “Contradicting the testimony of his own ambassador, President Trump says he wanted ‘nothing’ from Ukraine and says the #ImpeechmentHearings should be brought to an end.” 

But Trump was quoting from what ambassador Gordon Sondland said during testimony to the House Intelligence Committee. 

“I finally called the president… I believe I just asked him an open-ended question, Mr. Chairman,” Sondland told Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). “What do you want from Ukraine? I keep hearing all these different ideas and theories and this and that. What do you want?”

“It was a very short abrupt conversation, he was not in a good mood, and he just said, ‘I want nothing. I want nothing. I want no quid pro quo. Tell Zelensky to do the right thing,’ something to that effect,” Sondland added.

AP issued a correction for an inexcusable bit of fake news, but offered no apology:

“An earlier tweet that didn’t make clear that President Trump was quoting from Gordon Sondland’s testimony in which he was quoting Trump has been deleted,” the agency wrote.

It did not apologize for the error.

That followed this:

The situation unfolded one day after the AP, wire agencies Reuters and AFP, and a slew of media outlets, deleted or significantly revised stories that reported a claim by a supposed expert that the Trump administration had detained 100,000 migrant children. 

The media outlets took their figures from a U.N. report published Nov. 18, the author of which has since admitted the numbers are from a U.N. refugee agency report citing data from 2015. 

That was during the administration of President Barack Obama. 

The AP also did not apologize for circulating the number and attributing it to the Trump administration.

ABC News Forced to Correct ‘Bombshell’ About Trump’s Ukraine Call

The title is Breitbart's: ABC News Forced to Correct ‘Bombshell’ About Trump’s Ukraine Call. It was brought to my attention by an emailer who I assume wants to be anonymous for personal reasons. In fact, I had seen the story but blocked it out as soon as I came to a key name.

Just follow the link for the details. The bottom line is this. ABC had to walk it all back because:

1) Their source wasn't who they said he was, and

2) Their source retracted the main point of the story, reducing it to--ready?--mere gossip.

Really. I'm not kidding.

As John Nolte says:

The central premise of the story has been wiped out by the facts. But, as we all know, ABC News is not a legitimate news organization ...