Over at the Lifestyle blog, John Hawkins rounds up “The 10 Biggest Failures Of 2011.” But as Jonah Goldberg writes in his own year-end round-up, 2011 was the year that everybody blew it:
The Occupy movement’s meager tangible accomplishments (We recycled our own urine!) are inversely correlated with their lavish press coverage. The protesters were named Time magazine’s person of the year. Though in fairness, Time diluted its sycophancy by including the Arab Spring protesters who’ve (so far) ushered in a glorious new era of Islamism in places such as Egypt. Winning!
(Though perhaps not as clear cut a “win” as President Obama’s decision to declare political victory and pull our troops out of Iraq prematurely, so we can lose a war we sacrificed so much to win.)
Back home, tea-party politicians who truly won historic midterm-election victories are cast as dangerous losers. The Occupiers lost their bongs and yurts to bulldozers in cities across America, but museums around the country are nonetheless desperate to acquire authentic Occupy-movement artifacts to commemorate their glorious but unspecified successes. Unfortunately, the tea parties cannot work the refs of history this way, because they clean up their mess after they get together.
No word if the Smithsonian collected some genuine Occupier scat to be preserved next to the alleged specimens from the Yeti and Sasquatch. Lord knows they left enough behind for others to scoop.
And so it goes. The economy continued to languish while the president declared victory over a Depression that never was and touted himself as the most legislatively successful president ever — with the “possible exceptions” of FDR, LBJ, and Lincoln.
Meanwhile, we are approaching the third year of the long winter Obama once celebrated as a “recovery summer.” Its chief selling points are an unemployment rate statistically lowered by more Americans giving up hope of finding a job, and the claim that millions of jobs have been “created or saved.” This bogus locution allows Obama to claim every job he doesn’t destroy as a win.
And let us not forget the Republicans, whose feckless squad of A-Team candidates stayed on the bench for fear of joining the mosh pit of cannibalism the primary has become, setting the stage for a potential loss in 2012 that not even Charlie Sheen will be able to spin as a victory.
Speaking of attempting to spin a disaster, at Big Government, in a lengthy read-the-whole-thing article which sums up the key events of the past several months, Andrew Breitbart notes how badly the MSM attempted to spin like a dreidel over Occupy Wall Street for numerous reasons, not the least of which was because they were so deeply in the (septic) tank with the movement:
From the beginning, Occupy Wall Street was a huge progressive political Lollapalooza, an operation supported by unions and Democrats, planned and coordinated by career anarchists, and populated by students and fellow travelers. It quickly descended into a circus, a freak show, and a crime scene. The Breitbart sites actively chose to do what the mainstream media refused to do: hyper-focus on what was really going on. In so doing, we stumbled upon proof that key members of the media—including the New York Times, MSNBC, and Rolling Stone—were acting as public relations strategists and provocateurs on behalf of the Occupy movement.
There’s your “Story of the Year,” Time Magazine.
The Obama campaign, the Democratic Party, and the media colluded in an attempt to create class war in America in the pursuit of getting President Obama re-elected and ending the momentum of limited government conservatism as embodied in the Tea Party. Occupy’s crimes were committed by members of a movement whose goal was to neutralize the power of the Tea Party. And killing the Tea Party to keep the Democrats and President Obama afloat is now the mainstream media’s number one objective—by any means necessary.
The first proof of media coordination emerged in an email archive obtained by the Breitbart sites. It showed that MSNBC host Dylan Ratigan and Rolling Stone political editor Matt Taibbi had participated in a private group email chain with Occupy’s behind-the-scenes organizers—the bulk of whom are anarchists, socialists, communists, and anti-Israel activists, along with sundry international rabble-rousers of all stripes. Ratigan and Taibbi advised the nascent movement on its message and how to grow the group effectively to be a left-wing version of the Tea Party.
The email chain revealed the involvement of the usual suspects behind many international socialist and anarchist driven protests, including anti-WTO, anti-G8, and anti-G15 events; the people behind the manufactured Cindy Sheehan “Camp Casey” occupation outside of President George W. Bush’s Crawford, Texas ranch; and even the “GOP Welcoming Committee” group that rioted against the 2008 Republican convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. The latter featured the arrests of key participants tied to Occupy organizer Lisa Fithian, who are now in federal prison for a botched plan to use Molotov cocktails on the GOP delegates and the police protecting them.
The mainstream media, which are promoting Occupy in their year-end wrap-ups, will not connect these basic dots. Instead they choose to ignore the dots and attack those who point them out. The key struggle in America today is over the narrative: on one side the old media (New York Times, ABC, CBS, NBC, Washington Post, CNN, Time, Newsweek), and on the other side the new media. The latter is a samizdat amalgam of independent blogs, talk radio shows, Fox News, and social media like Twitter and Facebook which have helped to make the samizdat drumbeat louder. They are forcing old media to acquiesce and are further exposing that media’s obvious biases while further dwindling old media’s former captive audience.
While we had lots of fun earlier this month Photoshopping an alternative cover for Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” story, Andrew has an even better choice for Time’s editors, which you’ll have to click over to read. In the meantime, a related video on OWS found at Small Dead Animals:
Elsewhere in news of fresh disasters and MSM journalists risking, as Jonah might say, scrotal torsion, at the Washington Examiner, Gene Healy rounds up “the Five worst op-eds of 2011.”
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