The Washington Free Beacon “Illustrates White House’s insertion of Obama into other presidential biographies.” Click over for the Photoshops — and then stop by the “Obama In History” Tumblr site for even more.
(Via Twitchy, which rounds up reaction on Twitter to the “unexpectedly” fragile ego of our 44th president.)
Update: Yes, this is true: Though Elvis is indeed everywhere, Barack Obama has no Elvis in him.
Regarding the startling “Positionality” of Harvard Law’s “first woman of color,” Elizabeth Warren, “Do they need a second woman of color? I’m thinking of applying.”
– Mark Steyn at the Corner, linking to our post earlier today on Warren.
“There is a delicious irony in seeing private luxury jets flying into Washington, D.C., and people coming off of them with tin cups in their hand, saying that they’re going to be trimming down and streamlining their businesses,” Rep. Gary Ackerman, D-New York, told the chief executive officers of Ford, Chrysler and General Motors at a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee.
“It’s almost like seeing a guy show up at the soup kitchen in high hat and tuxedo. It kind of makes you a little bit suspicious.”
He added, “couldn’t you all have downgraded to first class or jet-pooled or something to get here? It would have at least sent a message that you do get it.”
– “Big Three auto CEOs flew private jets to ask for taxpayer money,” CNN, November 19, 2008.
– “Obama’s Private-Jet Offensive,” the Daily Beast, June 30th, 2011.
– Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner, today.
Lending even more prescience to I Own the World’s Photoshop from the start of the month, the Politico reports today:
Elizabeth Warren has pushed back hard on questions about a Harvard Crimson piece in 1996 that described her as Native American, saying she had no idea the school where she taught law was billing her that way and saying it never came up during her hiring a year earlier, which others have backed up.
But a 1997 Fordham Law Review piece described her as Harvard Law School’s “first woman of color,” based, according to the notes at the bottom of the story, on a “telephone interview with Michael Chmura, News Director, Harvard Law (Aug. 6, 1996).”
The mention was in the middle of a lengthy and heavily-annotated Fordham piece on diversity and affirmative action and women. The title of the piece, by Laura Padilla, was “Intersectionality and positionality: Situating women of color in the affirmative action dialogue.”
(See also: 7 pols with Native American heritage)
“There are few women of color who hold important positions in the academy, Fortune 500 companies, or other prominent fields or industries,” the piece says. “This is not inconsequential. Diversifying these arenas, in part by adding qualified women of color to their ranks, remains important for many reaons. For one, there are scant women of color as role models. In my three years at Stanford Law School, there were no professors who were women of color. Harvard Law School hired its first woman of color, Elizabeth Warren, in 1995.”
Meanwhile, at Big Journalism today, “Buried in the ‘For the Record’ section, the Boston Globe today admitted that it made a major error in one of its initial reports on Elizabeth Warren’s claim of Native American ancestry.”
And speaking of Photoshops from I Own the World, for your monitor’s safety, please ensure that all beverages have been properly digested before clicking on this link.
Update: Linking to this post, Jonah Goldberg tweets, “Elizabeth Warren was Harvard Law’s ‘first woman of color’? It’s like a Tom Wolfe novel.” Indeed — and note that it’s filed under our “God and Man at Dupont University” category.
Related: Michelle Malkin tweets, “Only in ProgWorld am I considered white, while pasty Elizabeth Warren is heralded as a ‘woman of color.’”
Past performance is once again no guarantee of future results:
Every appearance by a top Republican official or candidate should be recorded. Every one of them.All it takes is one “Macaca” incident to transform a race or create one where one didn’t exist. As the Montana incident blogged earlier today showed, a video can knock out prospective candidates before they even enter.
And this is no longer about finding one big blunder to put on a campaign commercial. It’s about using video and (free) technologies like YouTube to build narratives about opponents, using their own words, at their own events.
– Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos, from May of 2007. Plenty on the right would also take him up on the offer beginning in 2009, although one of the most lethal “gotchas” by that rarest of birds, the enterprising Huffington Post journalist, who captured Obama with her cell phone video in 2008 delivering his Bitter Clingers speech, the very definition of a Kinsleyesque gaffe.
Which brings us to this item at BuzzFeed yesterday: “Cell Phone Ban Keeps Obama Fundraisers Secret:”
Former aides to presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, Rick Perry, and Jon Huntsman all expressed surprise at the practice, and they’ve never seen an instance where a campaign asked donors to surrender their cell phones.
The former Clinton aide called the Obama policy “absurd,” suggesting that the Obama policy is almost certainly a response to the infamous 2008 fundraiser where Obama described voters in rural Pennsylvania as “bitter.”
“They cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,” Obama told donors in San Francisco, in a gaffe that breathed new life into Clinton’s campaign at the time.
“What is he hiding? Candidates should be for and against the same issue in private as they are in public,” said former Perry campaign manager Rob Johnson. “This shows just how uncomfortable the Obama team is with their message an their candidate. And in addition to religion and guns, voters like to cling to their cell phones.”
Presumably this ban is valid in all 57 states, and Obama will dispatch the necessary corpse-men to enforce it, even if they have to confiscate every cell phone in Cominsky Park.
Past performance is no guarantee of future results:
– Daniel Okrent, then the Times’ ombudsman, July 25, 2004.
– Headline, the Washington Examiner, today.
Hey, to be fair, Mr. Obama himself declared yesterday that you couldn’t trust the same media that dubbed itself Obama’s “non-official campaign” back in 2008. This is one time we’ll take the president at his word.
Update: The cocoon remains the same, though: “NYTimes Published Poll Showing Bad News for Obama on Gay Marriage Stand, Romney Matchup…on Page A17,” Newsbusters reports.
The Huffington Post reports: “Mitt Romney: Obama Spending Has Fanned ‘Prairie Fire Of Debt:’”
Republican Mitt Romney says President Barack Obama’s reckless spending has fanned a “prairie fire of debt” while portraying himself in a speech in battleground Iowa as the defender of fiscal responsibility.
The likely GOP presidential nominee is trying to frame his campaign against the Democratic president as a contest of fairness versus irresponsibility.
In a speech Tuesday afternoon in Iowa, Romney will say that, in his words, “a prairie fire of debt is sweeping across Iowa and our nation and every day we fail to act we feed that fire with our own lack of resolve.”
A “Prairie Fire,” you say? Could be a coincidence, or it could be a reference to what my fellow PJ Columnist Zombie dug up in October of 2008 — “William Ayers’ forgotten communist manifesto: Prairie Fire:”
As Zombie noted back then, this was the title of one of Ayers’ Weather Underground manifestos. Click over for numerous scanned pages, including:
The following snippet is taken from the book’s dedication page, and shows that the Weather Underground dedicated the book to Robert F. Kennedy’s killer Sirhan Sirhan, among many other now-obscure ’60s-era radicals, criminals and revolutionaries:
Anybody told Ethel and Caroline of this book’s existence, or Ayers’ relationship to Obama?
As spotted by the Watts Up With That blog. Note the 2007 date and the highlighted passage in the article:
Its always important to remember what has been predicted by the elders of science, and to review those predictions when the time is right. In four months, just 132 days from now at the end of summer on the Autumnal Equinox September 22nd 2012, the Arctic will be “nearly ice free” according to a prominent NASA scientist in a National Geographic article on December 12, 2007.
Fred Siegel of City Journal once dubbed this trend “Progressives Against Progress:”
Crankery, in short, became respectable. In 1972, Sir John Maddox, editor of the British journal Nature, noted that though it had once been usual to see maniacs wearing sandwich boards that proclaimed the imminent end of the Earth, they had been replaced by a growing number of frenzied activists and politicized scientists making precisely the same claim. In the years since then, liberalism has seen recurring waves of such end-of-days hysteria. These waves have shared not only a common pattern but often the same cast of characters. Strangely, the promised despoliations are most likely to be presented as imminent when Republicans are in the White House. In each case, liberals have argued that the threat of catastrophe can be averted only through drastic actions in which the ordinary political mechanisms of democracy are suspended and power is turned over to a body of experts and supermen.
Which is why, not at all coincidentally, such crankery went into overdrive in the naughts, culminating in Obama’s now failed rash of venture socialism. As many recent “not-so-final countdowns” will be coming due in the next few months and years, the Internet is going to have lots of fun pointing them out — something the MSM “unexpectedly” does so rarely.
(H/T: SDA)
Related: “Warmist Professor: I Call Global Warming Skeptics ‘Deniers’ So People Compare Them To Holocaust Deniers — What makes this even more grotesque is the professor is a Holocaust survivor.”
Wow, when Obama wrote in 2006, “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views,” he wasn’t kidding — six years later, an Atlantic writer dubs him, “Barack Obama: Our First Gay-Female-Hispanic-Asian-Jewish President,” running down the various encomiums Obama’s received from Andrew Sullivan, Kathleen Parker, Geraldo Rivera and other incredibly cheap dates fawning acolytes, including:
In June 2010, The Washington Post‘s Kathleen Parker took the question mark out of the way. “Obama: Our first female president,” her headline declared. Her column made the case that his crisis management style was more typically female.
First Jewish President: Like this week’s issue of Newsweek, New York magazine went big on their Morrison reappropriation. Former White House counsel Abner Mikva told John Heilemann “When this all is over, people are going to say that Barack Obama is the first Jewish president.” The magazine made it their cover.
First Asian-American President: In 2009, Associated Foreign Press ran with the headline, “Obama the first Asian-American president?” As evidence, the article notes that in his first hundred days, “Obama appointed a record three Asian-Americans cabinet members and quickly focused his attention across the Pacific. He invited Japan’s prime minister as his first guest and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went to Asia on her maiden trip.”
First Hispanic President: Geraldo Rivera spoke in March 2009 about the hopes the Hispanic community had for Obama’s immigration policies, alleging “Barack Obama is the first Hispanic president the same way Bill Clinton was the first black [one].”
My God, he really is the second coming of Peter Lemon Moodring, isn’t he?
Related: Perhaps he’s Zelig as well: Seth Mandel of Commentary notes that Obama has had his name shoehorned into every White House presidential biography beginning with Coolidge, with the exception of Gerald Ford.
More: Chicago machine politician hyped to mythopoeic status by media at the start of his presidential bid cautions college students not to believe the same media that created his legend.
Noting that “One of the things you become conscious of when cover or write about news every day is how uninformed and/or disinterested the average person is concerning news,” Peter Ingemi, who blogs as “DaTechGuy” ponders “Will the Newsweek cover make people think Obama has come out?”
Quoting Glenn Reynolds’ joke that “If I were a GOP operative, I’d distribute thousands of those Newsweek issues to black barbershops in key precincts,” Ingemi responds:
How many people are going to see this cover in passing? How many doctor’s offices, waiting rooms, barber shops, (Black and otherwise) and other places where free copies of Newsweek go to die will this cover sit for months, perhaps all the way to election day?
And How many of those people who are too busy to read the story inside will see this cover on a magazine called NEWSWEEK without reading Andrew Sullivan’s piece and think Obama has come out as Gay?
I’m betting an awful lot.
If you think that is going to have a positive net effect on the president’s re-election effort, then you just might live in the MSM media bubble.
It seems like a long shot to me — this supposition assumes that people actually read Newsweek. (Although plenty of people with the good sense to avoid buying Newsweek have already seen the cover via Drudge and a zillion other Websites embedding its image.)
On the other hand, consider how lucky it is for Obama that Newsweek’s cover broke in May rather than October. How many low-information voters assumed that John McCain temporarily suspending his campaign in late September of 2008 at the height of the financial markets’ meltdown meant that he was permanently suspending it?
Speaking of Newsweek, a columnist there “Likens ‘Insufferable’ Ann Romney To Hitler, Stalin,” Real Clear Politics reports, with video from — where else? — MSNBC:
Goldberg found Ann Romney’s glowing praise of motherhood in a column she wrote for USA Today to be “kind of creepy.” During an appearance on MSNBC’s weekend program “Up with Chris Hayes,” Goldberg said the phrase “the crown of motherhood,” which Ann Romney used in her column, reminded her of “authoritarian societies” that give out awards for large families.
“In a lot ways, the column was totally anodyne, right? She’s, you know, yes, motherhood is beautiful. I found that phrase, ‘the crown of motherhood’ really kind of creepy. Not just because of it’s somewhat — you know, it’s kind of really authoritarian societies that give out like a Cross of Motherhood. They give out awards for big families,” Goldberg said on the program’s panel.
“You know, Stalin did it, Hitler did it,” she said.
Oh, you mean International and National Socialists. Newsweek seemed to believed that such concepts were universal, only a few years ago.
Or as blogger “Irish Spy” tweets, “Does the Romney campaign have double agents inside Newsweek? It’s the only explanation.”
Update: Welcome Hugh Hewitt fans!
As Jonah Goldberg noted in Liberal Fascism, the “Progressives” of a century ago were astonishingly racist, including such figures as Woodrow Wilson, Margaret Sanger, HG Wells, and George William Hunter, who wrote the book that John Scopes desired to teach in his classroom. A century later, and Chris Matthews demonstrates that everything comes full circle:
Matthews interviewed Bishop Harry Jackson, who has spoken out against Barack Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage. Speaking of Jesus Christ, Matthews ridiculously linked accusations that Mitt Romney once bullied a teen, nearly 50 years ago: “Do you think [Christ] would have been chasing after the kid with long hair and cutting his hair or he would have been the one protecting the kid with long hair in high school?”
Matthews sarcastically added, “But you’re with the guy who was going after the kid with long hair.” (Pastor Jackson informed the host that he was not, yet, supporting Romney.)
Fellow black minister, Reverend Delman Coates also appeared on the show. After Coates indicated he supported gay marriage, Jackson retorted, “Why not let the Muslims have polygamy and bigamy?”
This prompted Matthews to insultingly suggest: “I hope you evolve. Thank you very much. I’m just teasing.”
Considering Matthews routinely plays the race card, will he apologize for telling a black man to “evolve?”
Now we know why MSNBC hired Al Sharpton to appear on the network — it’s insurance that he won’t be hosting another show trial against a fallen MSNBC anchor.
Related: At Hot Air, Ed Morrissey notes, “Video: Preachers in Baltimore blast Obama for same-sex marriage stance:”
No one expects the congregants of Pastor Burns’ church to run out and vote for Romney, but they’re going to be a lot less enthused about Obama — and a lack of enthusiasm in his base will put an end to hopes of a second term. Maryland is a safe state for Democrats under normal conditions; it last went Republican in 1988, and Obama won it by 25 points in 2008. However, the same reason for that large margin of victory shows the risk for Obama, which is that 30% of the vote in the state comes from the African-American community that Pastor Burns and others serve.
Which is one reply to the question that Obama tacitly asks his base whenever he zigs to the right, alienating his anti-war base by not closing Gitmo and keeping in place many elements of GWB’s GWOT tactics, then zags to the left, alienating black and other minority voters in supporting gay marriage. Where is Obama’s base going to go?
Possibly not out of their homes on election day.
Update: Jim Treacher writes, “Ain’t no politics like identity politics ’cause identity politics don’t stop.”
I shouted out who played the Kennedys, when after all, it was Barack Hussein. At the Blaze, Jonathon M. Seidl writes, “Despite endorsing Obama in 2008, JFK’s daughter Caroline now considers Obama a ‘liar,’ according to a family source in Edward Klein’s new book on Obama called ‘The Amateur.’ After spotlighting numerous examples of bad blood between the Kennedy family and the man Teddy and Caroline designed as JFK’s successor in 2008, Seidl concludes:
Ethel Kennedy, “the matriarch of the family,” similarly felt scorned, according to Klein. He tells a story of her invitation — extended to the First Family — being ignored by the Obamas. She got so upset “that she went on a rampage inside her house, cursing the president and turning over furniture.”
And to top it all of, Caroline, the family source tells Klein in the book, believes “that as a loyal Democrat, she has nowhere to go, no one else to possibly support except Obama.”
(Related: Explosive New Book: Bill Clinton Thought Obama an ‘Amateur,’ Urged Hillary to Quit and Run in 2012)
And guess what: “the Obamas know that she has nowhere else to go, so they see no point in being nice to her.”
That “really pisses her off.”
Wait, the Obama administration is cruel to a prominent female Democrat — I’m shocked, shocked!
But really, where else can Caroline and the rest of the Kennedy clan go?
Found the Rhetorican, George Lucas has a little fun with his fellow One Percenters in posh Marin County, after they rejected his proposal to build a movie studio (which would bring jobs, revenue, and additional taxes into the area). First, his PR department issued a statement that reads:
The level of bitterness and anger expressed by the homeowners in Lucas Valley has convinced us that, even if we were to spend more time and acquire the necessary approvals, we would not be able to maintain a constructive relationship with our neighbors.
We love working and living in Marin, but the residents of Lucas Valley have fought this project for 25 years, and enough is enough. Marin is a bedroom community and is committed to building subdivisions, not business. Many years ago, we tried to stop the Lucas Valley Estates project from being built, but we failed, and we now have a subdivision on our doorstep.
Next — well, we’ll let Movies.com take it from here:
[Lucas] wants to transform the property into low-income housing, naturally, ending their official statement with this zinger, “If everyone feels that housing is less impactful on the land, then we are hoping that people who need it the most will benefit.”
He’s working with the Marin Community Foundation to instead construct affordable housing for either low-income families or seniors living on small, fixed incomes. In order to smooth along the development, he’s already given them all of the pricey technical studies and land surveys Lucasfilm spent years conducting. And we think that’s just great. Because if there’s one thing rich people will hate more than having movie magic made in their backyard, it’s poor people moving in.
Mr. Lucas, we may hate you for turning your back on the original trilogy, but our hat is off to you on this one. Well played.
Heh. Incidentally, the press release from Lucasfilm’s PR department that Movies.com quotes goes on to note:
While we managed to build on Skywalker Ranch after one year master plan approval and another year PDP approval, it took over 10 years for the Master Plan approval on Big Rock and Grady Ranches. It took us three years for a PDP on Big Rock and now we are four years into trying to get a PDP permit for Grady Ranch with no end in sight.
As the company grew we realized we needed more space than what we were building in Lucas Valley at Skywalker Ranch, and it could not accommodate the whole company. We then worked to find more land on which to expand our corporate headquarters, our video game enterprise LucasArts, and our visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic. We were told there was no way we would be able to build a facility of that size in Marin County and therefore we moved the majority of our employees from Marin to the Presidio in San Francisco. We’ve had a great partnership with the Presidio Trust and created a low impact facility which offers great benefit to its surrounding community
How out of touch is Marin? They make San Francisco look like a pro-business city — at least from Lucas’s perspective. On the other hand, it’s a rather distorted perspective. Considering Lucas thinks of communist Vietnam as the good guys, why should he be angry at a local government that attempts to thwart his business plans — or be surprised at “The level of bitterness and anger” expressed by his fellow California leftists, simply because they’ve aimed their rancor towards him?
Found via The Rhetorican, who goes on to note, “Now all they need over there is a state prison and Marin County will finally be representative of California state government’s three main constituencies: ‘the very rich, the very poor, and the public employees.’”
Update: Will Smith gets mugged reality, decides not to move to France anytime soon. Don’t miss the video.
Over at Time-Warner owned CNN, anchor Ali Velshi believes the election is already over:
VELSHI: Joining me now from Washington is, CNN’s chief national correspondent John King. John, I have a thesis I want to run by you. Mitt Romney has already lost the election because of this.
Voters in Ohio, auto workers and union members are alienated by his stance on the bailout. You know, John, because you spend a lot of time in Ohio like I have. It is GM country in large part.
They will hand that state to President Obama and without Ohio, probably Romney doesn’t get to the White House. What do you think?
In February of 2010, Velshi was the CNN anchor who presented on-air a cake to the Obama administration, to celebrate the first anniversary of the Obama “stimulus” program, saying, “Happy birthday, dear stimulus. Our producer Ben Tinker (ph) baked this cake. It is a stimulus happy birthday — first birthday cake, which is also a pie chart. It is the birthday of the stimulus.” (See photo below.) So as even as CNN may be the last news network whose PR attempts to feign objectivity, it seems safe to say we know Velshi’s already picked sides in 2012. Similarly, as Noel Sheppard writes today at Newsbusters, “CNN’s Don Lemon Compares Mitt Romney to 60s Segregationist George Wallace,” for having the same views on gay marriage that Obama publicly professed to having until this past week.
In a new post titled “Newsweek’s Cover & Why Obama Turned Gay for Pay–He Knows He’s Being Fired,” Tammy Bruce also believes the election is over; but comes to an entirely opposite conclusion than Velshi:
The following revelation come from a dinner conversation at a fancy restaurant last night (she’s a 1percenter, I’m proudly Friends with 1percenters
In the midst of some complaining about Obama, the conversation naturally turned to him becoming Gay for Pay, as phrase normally used for heterosexual young male hustlers who are willing to sleep with men if the price is right. Obama’s sudden support for gay marriage, and the fundraising-mania surrounding his confession, makes the phrase unfortunately apt for the Preezy of the United Steezy.
That said, we then wondered why Obama would really do it. We know he doesn’t give a damn about the issue, and oh sure, he’ll get a bit more cash from the left, but it really won’t even make a dent in what he wants to fund-raise or plans on spending. None of the swing-states at risk during the election were hanging by a thread on this issue (to say the least), and in fact this will likely hurt him in at least North Carolina and Virginia.
Then it dawned on me–Obama’s internal polls must show him losing to Romney, and handily. The latest Rasmussen certainly show the Golfer-in-Chief in trouble and behind the GOP nom. He must realize it’s over and is now simply looking to establish his “legacy,” while reinforcing leftist relationships he desperately wants to keep–like with Hollywood–after we kick his ass to the curb. For an obsessed, cynical and narcissistic president like Obama, he only makes moves that serve his agenda one way or another–and the only upside to this exists out of the White House. Liberal gays will vote for him anyway, and 1 in 6 of his top bundlers have already raised $500,000+ for him. I believe he’s frantic to not have his legacy be the truth–one of disaster brought by narcissism and incompetence, he hopes this sort of story, covers like Newsweek, will be the thing that allows him to walk away at least within his liberal/leftist base as not a complete pariah.
Even more telling–throughout this conversation in the table next to us were a couple of gay men. When I declared my realization that Obama knew he was out, it was, well, a little louder than I would have liked. The two fellows next to us looked over, and as I expected some snarky remark back, they both just looked depressed and then down at their very French appetizers. They knew, too, that they were being played by Obama and that as gays we were all now being saddled with a gigantic “gay friendly” failure of a Preezy.
Mickey Kaus reaches a somewhat similar conclusion; he ponders if Obama is “Thinking two steps ahead?”
If Barack Obama loses the 2012 election, do you think he’s going to quit elective politics, serve on a series of corporate and foundation boards, write a best-selling children’s book on being a Dad and a Lugaresque memoir describing how Fox News and Peter Orszag betrayed him? I don’t. I think he’s going to run again, Grover Cleveland style. That casts possible additional (distant) light on today’s endorsement of same-sex marriage: It may or may not help Obama in 2012. But it would much more reliably likely help him in 2016, when public opinion can be expected to have shifted further in favor of this social innovation. It would certainly help him in the Democratic primaries. ….
It certainly seems plausible (and as Kaus goes on to add, he’s not suggesting that Obama’s throwing in the towel this year, unlike Bruce’s theory). At least Bill Clinton seemed to enjoy governing — running for office is the only thing Obama seems qualified to do — but first we have to get through the campaign he’s running now. So who’s right? CNN’s cake-proffering palace guard anchor or Tammy Bruce? We’ll know in the coming weeks and months.
Update: Welcome Five Feet of Fury Readers.
“4-Year-Old’s Overdue Library Books Returned After Police Sent To Family’s House,” CBS Pittsburgh reports:
The case of the four overdue library books and the little girl who borrowed them is closed, thanks in part to local police who were sent to investigate the case.
Four-year-old Katelyn Jageman’s books were due back to the Freeport Area Library on Oct. 19, 2011. Until Thursday, they were still in her possession. Library officials said after several attempts to retrieve the books, the case was turned over to police, who made a courtesy call to the child’s home.
“It’s a rare incident, but it does occur,” said Donna Michael, President of the Freeport Area Library Board.
After phone calls and letters to the family, Michael admitted she alerted authorities and put the problem in their hands.
“I did turn the file over to the police department,” she said.
Here’s exclusive video of how the arrest went down:
At the Tatler, Bryan Preston observes the shameless hackery of Patrick Pexton, the Washington Post’s ombudsman, who punts rather than dealing with the paper’s botched hit piece on Mitt Romney high school days this past week:
Pexton says the story holds up to scrutiny, despite the fact that the story directly quoted a dead man; it claimed things about him that, being dead, he is in no position to affirm or refute; it mischaracterized the opinion of one of its core witnesses; and the family of the dead man says the story is factually inaccurate.
Other than that, it holds right up.
Pexton also admits that the Post timed the story to help the president.
The other criticisms are that this story was published knowing that President Obama was going to announce his shift in favor of gay marriage. The allegation is that somehow The Post is working with the White House to time the story.
Do I think The Post took advantage of the timing? Yes. Vice President Biden had telegraphed the president’s position on gay marriage just days earlier. This story on Romney was in preparation for three weeks. It is part of a series of biographical stories on Romney being written by Horowitz and others and edited by The Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and associate editor, David Maraniss, who is known for his best- selling biographies of major U.S. political figures.
That’s a fallacious appeal to authority. Just because David Maraniss had a hand in it and a committee of liberals handed him a trophy does not make this story factual or fair. Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer too.
If I were an editor I might have sped it up a little, too, to take advantage of the national discussion on gay marriage. Does that mean Post editors are timing stories with the White House? I hope not, and I doubt that is the case.
As Bryan writes, “But he didn’t pick up the phone and ask them, so deep is his curiosity on the subject. Pitiful.”
Pexton’s line that “Does that mean Post editors are timing stories with the White House? I hope not, and I doubt that is the case” is even more of an eye-roller when you consider the Post’s deep involvement in the JournoList fiasco, not to mention an earlier report in MSM house organ Editor & Publisher that the Post was coordinating cover stories with the New York Times.
But hey, given the disastrous economic straits of the Obamaconomy, shaped by the man the Post admitted to championing in 2008, I’m sympathetic both to Pexton’s desire for job security, and for looking out for future employment. After all, having “Washington Post Ombudsman” on your resume won’t look anywhere near as impressive if it’s followed by “Washington Post Reporter: Baltimore Sewer Board Zoning Regulation Hearings,” which is where Pexton would likely be transferred, if not fired, if he actually lived up to his current job title.
Update: Welcome readers clicking in from:
Original post follows below.
Well, this happened:
To make sense of the strange Time and Newsweek covers appearing at your supermarket news stand recently — Newsweek seemingly going from cover stories on light S&M one week to Obama as “The First Gay President” the next; Time magazine concurrently featuring a breast-feeding three-year-old(!) boy – it helps to understand the history of newsweeklies.
Time began publishing in 1923 as the first weekly news magazine; Newsweek debuted a decade later as a copycat publication. (It was bought by the Washington Post in 1961, and in 2010 famously unloaded by the now-ailing newspaper for a dollar.) As Alan Brinkley wrote in The Publisher, his 2010 biography of Time founder Henry Luce, Luce and his then-business partner Brit Hadden (who died at age 31 in 1929) were originally going to call their publication “Facts” when they first conceived of the notion of a weekly news magazine in the early 1920s. One night in 1922 though, as Brinkley writes, while Luce was riding the subway home, he came across an advertising card above the windows of the subway car that used the phrase “Time for a Change” or something similar in its copy, which convinced him that “Time” was the correct title for his nascent magazine idea:
Hadden immediately agreed, and they never reconsidered. “Time” was attractive to them because it captured something of the dual purpose of their enterprise—to chronicle the passage of time and to save readers precious time. “Take Time—It’s Brief,” was one of the early slogans they attached to their announcements of the new publication; “Time Will Tell” and “Time Is Valuable” were others.
It also helps to understand what a novelty a weekly news magazine was in the 1920s, by comparing it to the competing information mediums of the era, as Brinkley goes on to do. The first radio networks, the direct precursors to today’s NBC, CBS, and (slightly more circuitously) ABC, were formed in that era. Movies were extraordinarily popular, though they still lacked sound until the end of the decade. That was the media culture in which Time was born, Brinkley writes:
With the exception of the national wire services, whose stories were filtered through local newspaper editors with their own interests and tastes, Time—which even in its early, frail years had subscribers in every state—was for a while the only genuinely national news organ. No newspaper had a reach very far beyond its own city. Radio news in the 1920s consisted of an announcer reading headlines a few times a day. Newsreels were not yet prominent. Even with its relatively modest circulation in the 1920s, Time established itself as an important force in journalism if for no other reason than that it reached men and women in all parts of the country and promised to rescue them from isolation and provincialism and prepare them for the cosmopolitan world.
As John Podhoretz wrote in 2009, recounting his experiences at Time in the early 1980s, until the World Wide Web arrived in the early 1990s, newsweeklies were still hugely influential, through the eighties and nineties, with its top journalists receiving limousine service and tony expense accounts:
Time Inc., the parent company of Time, was flush then. Very, very, very flush. So flush that the first week I was there, the World section had a farewell lunch for a writer who was being sent to Paris to serve as bureau chief…at Lutece, the most expensive restaurant in Manhattan, for 50 people.So flush that if you stayed past 8, you could take a limousine home…and take it anywhere, including to the Hamptons if you had weekend plans there. So flush that if a writer who lived, say, in suburban Connecticut, stayed late writing his article that week, he could stay in town at a hotel of his choice. So flush that, when I turned in an expense account covering my first month with a $32 charge on it for two books I’d bought for research purposes, my boss closed her office door and told me never to submit a report asking for less than $300 back, because it would make everybody else look bad. So flush when its editor-in-chief, the late Henry Grunwald, went to visit the facilities of a new publication called TV Cable Week that was based in White Plains, a 40 minute drive from the Time Life Building, he arrived by helicopter—and when he grew bored by the tour, he said to his aide, “Get me my helicopter.”
Once Matt Drudge blew open the story of Bill Clinton’s dalliances with Monica Lewinsky, a story that Newsweek attempted to suppress, the walls quickly began to fall, and savvy news consumers quickly began to receive their news elsewhere — including from news aggregation sites such as Drudge and Instapundit, which can be and are updated numerous times a day, unlike the increasingly lethargic schedule of the newsweeklies.
We’re back in our P-51 Mustang, after our tour of duty on the bridge of the mighty USS Instapundit — a big thanks to Glenn Reynolds for allowing me to sit-in this past week, and a big thanks to my co-bloggers, whose posts were always a joy to read. As with the blog here at PJM and all of the great names I’m surrounded by, it’s quite an honor to share space with those whose blogs and articles I’m reading all of the time when not sitting in for the Professor.
And a big thanks to Glenn’s readers as well — checking Glenn’s Gmail account, one of the secrets of Instapundit quickly became obvious: in part, it’s a heavily edited and carefully selected version of Glenn’s email account. Glenn’s readers send him great material, making it easy for me this past week to cull it all down and put up all sorts of links to great articles.
As soon as I’m done removing the turret, glove-box refrigerator, Sidewinder missile launchers and flamed paint job from Glenn’s RX-8 before he notices, we’ll be back shortly with our usual assortment of posts on the news of the day. But if you missed the interviews and video that went up this past week, timed to coincide with our week on the big stage, click below for:
Back with more in a bit.
In our latest podcast, Harry Stein, a Manhattan Institute scholar, contributing editor at City Journal magazine, and a journalist who has written for publications ranging from TV Guide to Esquire, along with writing a half-dozen screenplays, discusses his new book, No Matter What…They’ll Call This Book Racist: How our Fear of Talking Honestly About Race Hurts Us All.
In 2008, we were told that electing Barack Obama president would put an end to centuries of American racism — and America did just that. And…yet, “unexpectedly,” racial tensions have only increased. During our interview, Harry discusses:
How a now-legendary sign at a 2009 Tea Party rally influenced the title of his new book.And much more. Click here to listen:
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(21 minutes long; 19.2 MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 6 MB lo-fi edition.)
Since in the past, a few people have complained of difficulties with the Flash player above and/or downloading the audio, use the video player below, or click here to be taken to YouTube, for an audio-only YouTube clip. Between one of those versions, you should find a format that plays on your system.
Our latest Silicon Graffiti video was inspired by one of the key themes in the late Allan Bloom’s 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom wrote that by the middle of the 20th century, American universities had essentially become enclaves of German philosophy. As a result, “the new American life-style has become a Disneyland version of the Weimar Republic for the whole family,” according to Bloom. Last year in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman famously asked, ‘Can Greeks Become Germans?’
Why not? If we could, any nation can. This video looks at how and why that happened, and the results — or at least scratches the surface of those concepts, inasmuch as any six minute video can.
And when you’re done watching, check out David P. Goldman at his “Spengler” column (and that nom de blog dovetails remarkably well with our theme, doesn’t it?) on “Philistinism and Failure,” and follow David’s link to Fred Siegel from the April issue of Commentary, for his brilliant article on “How Highbrows Killed Culture,” for much more on this theme.
A handy, portable, easily embeddable YouTube format of the video is available here. And click here for three years worth of earlier editions of Silicon Graffiti. The script of this week’s show, with plenty of hyperlinks to the books and blog posts that inspired it, follows on the next page.
