I have enjoyed reading THE DAILY CALLER for several years. It is on my regular places to visit on my daily perusals of news sites. I think I have seen the best of them, though.

The recent brouhaha over the doctor that was forcibly removed from the United Airlines Flight has made quite a stir. It was certainly bad form for United Airlines to whip up on a passenger. I wonder why they stopped at an $800 offer to get someone to volunteer to bail out on what was first said to be an overbooked flight? They’ll spend a hundred times more than that on their first consultation with their legal team.

It seems the doctor has a somewhat blemished past, had apparently been convicted of a felonious offering of prescription drugs in exchange for sex with a patient, and may have even been prohibited from practicing medicine for a while. While no one wants this on their record, those things have nothing to do with his forcible removal from the flight: yet, many news outlets reported various aspects of the doctor’s past in juicy, callous detail. While his convictions are a matter of public record, this is essentially gossip, or has the same mal-intent as gossip, since there is no connection with his past and his removal from the flight.

THE DAILY CALLER made it a point of telling us that they would not do such a low-down, underhanded thing as to smear the name of the doctor by making public his irrelevant past failures. No, they didn’t do that. Rather, they reported every bit of gossip the other news outlets were reporting, without reporting anything themselves, thus besmirching the doctor as bad as anyone who actually reported it. It reminds me of the secret we swore not to tell. When asked about it, we sanctimoniously reply that we promised not to tell the secret we were entrusted with, but if we WERE to tell, this is what we would likely say, “. . .” We fool ourselves that we have some integrity when we have none. We cheat at solitaire. Who, exactly, are we cheating?

Integrity is a hard won prize and must be zealously and relentlessly guarded lest we wind up trading it for something of far less personal value. Once lost, it may never be regained. It’s akin to losing your virginity. It can never be recovered. It is a precious thing, not to be treated lightly or frivolously. It is easily lost in a moment of poor judgment. The secret entrusted to us is sold for perhaps even more than the thirty pieces of silver Judas Iscariot received. As I recall, Judas did not even want the silver after he got it. What he lost was far more valuable than what he traded for. He made a bad bargain.

There are no news sources these days. There are only opinion outlets. From those multiple opinion outlets, it is possible to mostly catch a glimpse of the truth. It’s in there, somewhere, if you have the patience to dig for it and the ability to see past and reject all the rhinestones concealing the real diamond. We are easily distracted by the rhinestones.

I also once enjoyed BREITBART, but their success with the election of Donald Trump has gone to their head. They are no longer even entertaining. They are just obstreperous, shrill, and smug. Of course, many thought they were always so. I recognize that.

Nothing succeeds like success. Nothing forebodes future failure like a resounding success today. If you don’t believe it, ask Hillary Clinton. When it’s over, I expect you can ask Donald Trump the same thing. When your mouth is used twice as much as your ears, then you are four times more likely to let hubris lead you down deeper and deeper into a dead-end canyon where the sun never sheds any light. You start crossing the river with Sun-Tzu in front of you. Don’t think you’re doing good when you get half your entire army across the river successfully. That is when you can expect the fatal attack: half your army on the Sun-Tzu side, and the other half in the river making the crossing. There is no place to retreat to. There is no safety. You beat yourself. Of course, it pays to have read Sun-Tzu whether you like him or not. If you had, you’d have known not to try crossing the river in his face, but to keep the river safely between your army and his.

Never neglect what made you successful, thinking you have somehow moved beyond that to some place of permanent personal enshrinement. Before you know it, your name is besmirched like the United Airlines doctor-passenger.

Yes, you, too, can lose and lose magnificently. So can BREITBART. So can THE DAILY CALLER. So can Bill O’Reilly. So can the rest of them.

I wish them success, but they seem determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Be advised that I also read Politico, Real Clear Politics, The National Review, The Weekly Standard, Huffington Post, The Federalist, The American Spectator, The Washngton Free Beacon, and occasionally, when I need to remind myself that there are those who honestly do not share my political bend, Slate, Mother Jones, and The Daily Kos. It is good to know what others are thinking, even if I don’t agree with them. At least I can try to understand it, which I can do without embracing it. None of them are any more twisted than any other. They are all twisted. Thy all want good ratings. They all want hits. They all want to sell advertising. They do that through entertaining tidbits rather than hard news. They preach to their choirs. They all reinforce what they think their readers want to hear. We fool ourselves into believing we are right and have all the facts, when, mostly, all we have are the published opinions of those who have rather limited vision, or worse, have intentionally limited their publications to what they want to lead us to believe. As an anchor on MSNBC recently said, “It’s our job to instruct the people on what they should believe.” Oops. The truth exposes itself, as it will do from time to time if one pays attention.

Variety in reading makes for better, more civil communications all around.

Try communicating something of value DAILY CALLER. You might be able to regain your integrity, but I doubt it. When you figure out what you traded it for, let us all know. I’ll bet a dollar to a dime that you won’t think it was worth it.

Remember what the great Napoleon Bonaparte once said, and he was a great general, or perhaps a great evil, but nevertheless, great. He said, “Never interrupt your enemy when he is in the process of making a mistake.”

If you don’t like THE DAILY CALLER, don’t interrupt them; they are making fatal mistakes all on their own. If one chooses to interrupt them, one has to realize that a mistake is being made. I’d interrupt THE DAILY CALLER if I thought they would listen, but they lost me several months ago. Their mouths need stop working long enough to hear what others have to say that might benefit them. They might learn something.

I doubt they’ll get me back.

©2017 Mississippi Chris Sharp