Mark Twain is the smartest man alive.

"There are laws to protect the freedom of the press's speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press." -- Mark Twain

I make no secrets about the fact that I am a conspiracy theorist about the media. They plot and scheme and collude to print things that meet their agenda. What is their agenda? To report the truth? To expose corruption? Hardly. Their agenda is to destroy America. How do they plan on doing it? Easy.

1. Act sincere
2. Lie (as Costanza says - it's not a lie if YOU believe it!)
3. Deny

The media routinely report things that are false, one sided or inaccurate. Here's how they do it. I have a friend. For the sake of argument, we'll call him Kurt. When he doesn't want you to know something he won't lie to you. He just won't tell you the truth. He'll leave out details, or side step pointed questions. That's what the press does. They present portions of a story. They present data, but leave out the context. They use absurd scales on charts to make them look more powerful. They use statistics but not statistical methods. And the more controversial something is, the better. If it bleeds, it leads.

Here's a recent example of a subtle deceptive move. Playboy (hardly a bastion of balanced reporting) had a box headed "Dumb Like A Fox." The statistic was that 54% of Daily Show and Colbert Report viewers "passed" a quiz about current events by answering at least 66.67% of the questions correctly. Only 35% of Fox News watchers passed. They then had pictures of Stephen Colbert and Bill O'Reilly. It's a shot across the bow of O'Reilly, who those on the left love to hate. Colbert is the host of - stay with this - the Colbert Report. There's a direct correlation there. O'Reilly is the host of about 8% of Fox News Channel's programming. Why not show Brit Hume, Greta Van Susteren, Sean Hannity or Alan Colmes? They're not the blowhards that O'Reilly is, or are female, or are not conservative. No, putting O'Reilly's picture in there was done to associate his image with the phrase "Dumb As A Fox."

That was a minimalist example. The discovery of car bombs in London was called "a criminal act" not a terrorist act by the New York Times and NBC. Why? They want to believe, and want everyone else to believe, that the jihad doesn't exist. Why? It undermines the President, that's why.

The New York Times also ran coverage of the 5 terrorists who were captured plotting to blow up the jet fuel pipelines that run from New Jersey to JFK International Airport....on page 37. It didn't even rate page one news that a terror plot was disrupted in the city the paper claims as it's home! Why? It was a successful example of intelligence gathering and multinational, multi jurisdictional cooperation in the apprehension of the suspects, which reflects well on the the President. So they didn't lie about it, they just buried it.

Even Michael Moore is on the band wagon. He recently received some press that he didn't agree with (specifically that his new "documentary" is misleading. Saying Moore's work is misleading is like saying guns shoot bullets, but that's beside the point). In a clear example of how the left will turn on itself, just before he launched a personal attack on Wolf Blitzer, he bloviated about the media, shouting that he wished the "mainstream media" would "just for once" tell the truth. Without even pausing to appreciate how delicious the irony of the comment was, he said "you guys have such a poor track record.."

At last, Mike, you said something I can agree with.