As quoted by Steven Hayward in The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order: 1964-1980, political philosopher Michael Oakeshott once wrote that “politics is an activity unsuited to the young,” because:

Everybody’s young days are a dream, a delightful insanity, a sweet solipsism. Nothing in them has a fixed shape, nothing a fixed price; everything is a possibility, and we live happily on credit. There are no obligations to be observed; there are no accounts to be kept. Nothing is specified in advance; everything is what can be made of it. The world is a mirror in which we seek the reflection of our own desires. The allure of violent emotions is irresistible. When we are young we are not disposed to make concessions to the world; we never feel the balance of a thing in our hands—unless it be a cricket bat. … Since life is a dream, we argue (with plausible but erroneous logic) that politics must be an encounter of dreams, in which we hope to impose our own.

Perhaps that’s one explanation why so many liberals, as they get up in years, have both a surprising nostalgia for the past, and a “you kids get off my lawn” crankiness about contemporary society. This, despite that fact that liberalism, or progressivism, or simply the left, has been the dominant political philosophy – at least in Washington, academia and the media – for the last 75 years or so. Here are but a few examples we’ve rounded up of this trend in action. Back in November, a brief profile of a then-new biography of Kurt Vonnegut at NPR was titled, “Kurt Vonnegut Was Not A Happy Man. ‘So It Goes:’”

Vonnegut’s public persona was often at odds with the actual man. “He read the signs of what was happening in the country,” Shields says, “and he realized that he was going to have to be a lot hipper than a nearly 50-year-old dad in a rumpled cardigan to be a good match with what he was writing about.”

As a former public relations man for General Electric, Vonnegut knew how to construct an image, a public version of himself who readers could believe had written books like Cat’s Cradle and Breakfast of Champions.

“I don’t mean to persuade anybody that Kurt was a cynic,” Shields says. “Just the opposite.” But Vonnegut was more of a reactionary than a radical, someone who showed up for a meeting with the band Jefferson Airplane dressed in a Brooks Brothers suit and wingtip shoes. Someone who was deeply scarred by his experiences, and longed for the older, gentler America of his pre-war childhood.

As Kyle Smith noted at the time:

I think when you’re famous people call you “irascible,” but if not, you’re just a jerk. Also in the new biography of him: Vonnegut carefully constructed his hip image, using lessons he learned as a PR man for G.E. (Did Vonnegut and Reagan overlap there at all? Seems like they must have.)

In addition to the professional similarity with the Gipper, the late Vonnegut shared a love of American nostalgia with a much more unlikely source – someone, like Vonnegut, also deeply unhappy with contemporary America:

Back in 2006, when he was writing The Conscience of a Liberal, [Paul] Krugman found himself searching for a way to describe his own political Eden, his vision of America before the Fall. He knew the moment that he wanted to describe: the fifties and early sixties, when prosperity was not only broad but broadly shared. Wells, looking over a draft, thought his account was too numerical, too cold. She suggested that he describe his own childhood, in the ­middle-class suburb of Merrick, Long Island. And so Krugman began writing with an almost choking nostalgia, the sort of feeling that he usually despises: “The political and economic environment of my youth stands revealed as a paradise lost, an exceptional moment in our nation’s history …”

Krugman remembers Merrick in these terms, as a place that provoked in him “amazingly little alienation.” “All the mothers waiting to pick up the fathers at the train station in the evening,” he says, remembering. “You were in an area where there were a lot of quiet streets, and it was possible to take bike rides all over Long Island. We used to ride up to Sagamore Hill, the old Teddy Roosevelt estate.” The Krugmans lived in a less lush part of Merrick, full of small ranch ­houses each containing the promise of social ascent. “I remember there was often a typical conversational thing about how well the plumbers—basically the unionized blue-collar occupations—were doing, as opposed to white-collar middle managers like my father.”

In his review of Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris, Bruce Bawer noted perceptively that the Woodman, like Krugman is also another New York arch-liberal at odds with contemporary society:

While Allen likes to think of himself as a standard-issue Manhattan liberal, the sensibility of his films (whether he realizes it or not) is largely conservative.  Over and over he makes it clear that he despises pretty much everything that came out of the 1960s, and one after another of his films is an exercise in cultural nostalgia for the pre-Sixties world.   His pictures’ musical scores testify to his obsession with the Great American Songbook.  (Recall, for example, the sequence in Hannah and Her Sisters in which Dianne Wiest takes him to see a punk rock band that he hates, joking that “after they sing, they’re gonna take hostages” – after which, in order to give her a taste of “something nice,” he takes her to the Carlyle to hear Bobby Short perform Cole Porter.)  Just as The Purple Rose of Cairo and Radio Days are love letters to the 1930s and 40s – and both very charming ones, at that – Midnight in Paris is a love letter to the 1920s.

Nostalgia for the mid-century past isn’t just rooted to liberals on this side of the Atlantic, of course. “London is no longer an English city, says John Cleese. Is he right?” Ed West (no relation) of the Telegraph asked last year:

Cleese also spoke about the shift in British attitudes away from a “middle-class culture” and the emergence of a “yob culture”.

He said: “There were disadvantages to the old culture, it was a bit stuffy and it was more sexist and more racist. But it was an educated and middle-class culture. Now it’s a yob culture. The values are so strange.”

He added that he preferred living in Bath to London because the capital no longer felt “English”.

“London is no longer an English city which is why I love Bath,” he said. “That’s how they sold it for the Olympics, not as the capital of England but as the cosmopolitan city. I love being down in Bath because it feels like the England that I grew up in.”

More after the page break.

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In “The Gold Violin,” a second season episode of Mad Men, there’s a classic scene where Don has to deal with a pair of young writers that have been foisted upon him by Duck Phillips, his bete noir, in the hopes of attracting a younger, hipper demographic for a coffee company that Sterling Cooper is pitching to. (Perhaps the episode should have been titled 1,000,000 Years Before Starbucks.) In an effort to explain themselves to Don, the head of the tyro ad duo begins riffing in quasi-proto-hipster jazz speak-style riffs:

Smitty: I think it’s pretty clear why we’re here. You want to know how our generation feels. So! I get this letter from my friend back in Michigan. He’s still in school, man, and it’s got this – I don’t know – 60-page rant in it. So, dig it!

Smitty starts to read the Port Huron Statement: “We would replace power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance, by power in uniqueness, rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason, and creativity.”

Don: That’s a beautiful sentiment. Does your friend know what you do for a living?

Smitty: Yeah, there was a sh*tty note with it. But this whole concept, is deeeeep.

Don: Student for a Democratic Society. That’s a hell of a focus group.

Kurt, Smitty’s sidekick: It is…what it is.

Don (while shooting off a withering look): It’s idealistic – that’s nice.

Smitty: Your generation wants to talk about that newly designed can or the premium beans. But we don’t want to be told what we should do or how we should act. We just want to be.

Flash-forward to 2012. James Lileks asks,“Who’s up for a manifesto?”

 The Atlantic posted a Letter to Old People from the Web Generation today, the work of a young Polish chap. I’m writing this only because it was given some traffic by the Atlantic, and it’ll probably be held up as a brave thing the old, frightened media types will have to understand.

He begins with the usual mistake: young people are different than ANYONE ELSE and maybe your problem, pops, is that you don’t get it. You’re square. L-7. Herbert.

We grew up with the Internet and on the Internet. This is what makes us different; this is what makes the crucial, although surprising from your point of view, difference: we do not ‘surf’ and the internet to us is not a ‘place’ or ‘virtual space’. The Internet to us is not something external to reality but a part of it: an invisible yet constantly present layer intertwined with the physical environment. We do not use the Internet, we live on the Internet and along it.

Heavy, man. But perhaps Dick Clark said it best in 1967 — with a bitchin’ backing track, to boot.

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Yes,  that headline could cover just about all aspects of the network, but at the Tatler, Bryan Preston is focusing specifically on their coverage of tonight’s debate. As Bryan writes, “The Candidates Were Fine, but CNN is a Joke:”

None of the candidates committed a major gaffe. Santorum was wobbly at times as the central target, but never came off as unsuited to leadership. Romney was agile, Gingrich offered his usual mix of high level policy shrewdness and cynicism toward current federal practices. Ron Paul assailed spending and put himself to the left of the field on foreign policy. None of this was particularly new.

CNN, though, deserves serious criticism. These four men have put themselves forward as candidates to replace President Barack Obama as commander in chief. The economy is soft, gas prices are skyrocketing, the border is a violent mess and the world awaits the inevitable news that either Israel has launched a military strike on Iran’s nuclear program, or Iran has conducted a nuclear test. That’s the binary choice the world is looking at. Whichever event happens, and one of them will, the world will change drastically and immediately. If Israel strikes, will Iran move to close the Strait of Hormuz? Will it activate Hizballah not just in Lebanon, but in South America and Mexico? Will the resulting oil shock from either event drive the economy over the brink into depression? If Iran is allowed to complete a nuclear weapon, will the rest of the Middle East follow suit? Instead of exploring these serious issues at a length that respects the gravity, CNN chose instead to waste time asking the candidates to define themselves with one word. Moderator John King teased that inane question both before and after a break, to make it the climax of the night.

This is CNN, and CNN is stupid. It is unserious, lacking in judgment, unfair, ridiculous, petty and malignant. The GOP should consider disallowing CNN’s participation in any future debates.

Instead of a serious security question, King asked, 81 minutes into the debate, about the role of women in combat. Romney took that question as an opportunity to discuss the Iran threat. The first actual question about Iran’s nuclear program came from an audience member, fully 85 minutes into the debate. Fifteen minutes later, the debate moved onto other issues.

To rank the candidates is always subjective, but Romney probably comes off as the strongest leader with the broadest experience, with Gingrich the most interesting and expansive thinker, Santorum the most passionate advocate and Paul the most consistent in his positions, though his positions are often at odds with the Republican Party and mainstream America. CNN badly mishandled this important debate, which may be the final one before the GOP convention, and did a disservice to the American people.

In today’s National Review Online is a suggestion that — at last — the GOP should drop having MSM anchors hosting the candidates’ debates, a vestigial  holdover from the mid-century days of three TV networks that at least (with notable exceptions) attempted to hide or play down their biases. Those days have been gone for decades, and TV itself is starting to look pretty long in the tooth as a medium. They don’t call it the stupid party for nothing, but maybe there’s a chance it will finally listen.

(I know, I know — who am I kidding?)

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To paraphrase Ace, Harry Truman, he of the famous “The Buck Stops Here” motto, wept:

President Obama does not “accept responsibility” for high gas prices, his spokesman indicated today, arguing that Obama has done everything he could to bring down the price of oil and blaming the high gas prices on oil price increases caused by global factors.

“The president accepts the responsibility that he identified the next president should accept, back in 2008, which is the need to develop a comprehensive energy policy,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said today when asked if Obama “accept[s] responsibility” for the high price of oil and gas. “If you’re suggesting that there is responsibility for a rise in the global price of oil, it’s certainly not because of anything he hasn’t done to expand domestic oil and gas production,” Carney added.

Well, that’s one way not to put it.

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The slang term for rendering your laptop or cell phone inoperable is “bricking it.” Turning hundreds or thousands of dollars of electronics into an inert, brick-like state, which may cost a good chunk of change to fix — so much so that buying a new device might be the best bet.

That’s also a risk with the coal-powered uber-expensive Tesla electric car, according to Gawker-owned Jalopnik.com:

Tesla Motors’ lineup of all-electric vehicles — its existing Roadster, almost certainly its impending Model S, and possibly its future Model X — apparently suffer from a severe limitation that can largely destroy the value of the vehicle. If the battery is ever totally discharged, the owner is left with what Tesla describes as a “brick”: a completely immobile vehicle that cannot be started or even pushed down the street. The only known remedy is for the owner to pay Tesla approximately $40,000 to replace the entire battery. Unlike practically every other modern car problem, neither Tesla’s warranty nor typical car insurance policies provide any protection from this major financial loss.

* * * * *

Tesla Motors is a public company that’s valued at over $3.5 billion and has received $465 million in US government loans, all on the back of the promise that it can deliver a real world, all-electric car to the mainstream market. Yet today, in my opinion, Tesla seems to be knowingly selling cars that can turn into bricks without any financial protection for the customer.

Until there’s a fundamental change in Tesla’s technology, it would seem the only other option for Tesla is to help its customers insure against this problem. As consumers become aware that a Tesla is possibly just a long trip, a bad extension cord, or an accidental unplugging away from disaster, how many will choose to gamble $40,000 on that not happening? Would you?

Back in 2009, CNN reported that “The Obama Administration will lend Tesla Motors $465 million to build an electric sedan and the battery packs needed to propel it.” If the Jalopnik report is true, that’s yet more proof, as Rob Long wrote last month, “Obama is a terrible tech investor.  If the USA was a hedge fund, he’d be looking at a total collapse.”

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As Hugh Hewitt would say, Jim Geraghty proves to be indispensable once again, pulling up quotes from the memory hole of a decade ago:

“If drilling [in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge] were approved today, it would be ten years before oil arrived in refineries.” — Sierra Magazine, January-February issue, 2002.

Similarly, while we’ve all seen the CNBC interview with then-candidate Barack Obama back in June of 2008 when he signed off on high energy prices as long as they rose “gradually,” he was also concurrently giving interviews in which he condemned them as a cudgel against the Democrats’ nemesis, as Investor’s Business Daily notes:

When gas prices hit $4 a gallon in 2008, candidate Barack Obama said it was due to previous failed energy policies. Now that prices are heading still higher, President Obama calls it progress.

Already, pump prices are higher than they’ve been in previous years, suggesting they will top $4 soon and possibly reach an unprecedented $5 this summer.

President Obama is starting to notice the political implications. So he sent Robert Gibbs — now a top campaign adviser — out to tell the public not to worry.

“Just on Friday, the Department of the Interior issued permits that will expand our exploration in the Arctic,” Gibbs said Sunday. “Our domestic oil production is at an eight-year high, and our use of foreign oil is at a 16-year low. So we’re making progress.”

“Progress” isn’t exactly how Obama described the country’s energy picture in 2008, when gas prices were closing in on $4 a gallon. Then, it was a clear sign of “Washington’s failure to lead on energy,” which was “turning the middle-class squeeze into a devastating vise-grip for millions of Americans.”

“For the well-off in this country,” Obama said in May 2008, “high gas prices are mostly an annoyance, but to most Americans they’re a huge problem, bordering on a crisis.”

In August that year, he declared rising energy costs to be “one of the most dangerous and urgent threats this nation has ever faced” and that gas prices “are wiping out paychecks and straining businesses.”

While Gibbs is right that domestic production has climbed in the past three years, Obama’s policies had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

Oil coming from offshore wells was in the pipeline, so to speak, during the Clinton and Bush years, when those permits were issued. And the oil pouring out of North Dakota is the result of drilling on private lands.

Obama, in fact, has made it clear for years that he has no real interest in boosting domestic production.

Which brings us to David Harsanyi’s latest piece in Real Clear Politics. David asks, “Aren’t High Gas Prices What Democrats Want?”

According to the Institute for Energy Research, there is enough natural gas in the U.S. to meet electricity demand for 575 years at current fuel demand, enough to fuel homes heated by natural gas for 857 years and more gas in the U.S. than there is in Russia, Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and some place called Turkmenistan combined. Oil? The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that the United States could soon overtake Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the world’s top oil producer. There are tens of billions of easily accessible barrels of offshore oil here at home — and much more oil around the world.

Yes, gas prices have spiked an average of 14 cents a gallon in the past month and about 30 cents a gallon since last November, according to AAA. Oil prices jumped to a nine-month high — more than $105 a barrel — after the Iranians shut down their own energy exports to Britain and France so they could start a much-needed nuclear program, which is, no doubt, for wholly peaceful purposes.

Given the fungibility of commodities and the track record of civilization in the Middle East, we’ll likely always have to deal with occasionally painful fluctuations in the price of energy, regardless of what we do at home — drilling and new pipelines included. Still, fluctuations have a lot better track record than price controls.

Subsidizing quixotic green companies or creating carbon credits won’t stop the rules of basic economics. If the gas crunch starts hitting the economy, it’s doubtless that we will get an earful of populist hand-wringing and that we’ll hear the administration once again blame wealthy speculators and nasty oil companies.

Yet in the end, high gas prices are part of the plan. This is what the administration wants.

“Yeah, but they don’t like to admit it in an election year,” the Professor replies. I think it depends on who you ask.

Related: The chaps at JammieWearingFools spot $4.49 a gallon gas in New York City; could $5.00 a gallon gas be next? (Warning: auto-play video on that second link.)

Do I hear six dollars a gallon? Why yes, I do!

More: “Orwell wept.”

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Ruminating on the 500th episode of The Simpsons, in his latest Bleat, James Lileks writes:

I watched the 500th Simpsons last night, because it was the 500th episode. I suspect many tuned in, just to see what they’d do, or to have their suspicions reconfirmed, or see if Barney is drinking again. It made me nostalgic for the 90s, and I’m never nostalgic for the 90s.

(ten minutes thinking about the 90s)

It’s odd. The 90s were interesting. If there was a decade in my life I’d like to replay, that would be the one. The reason I have no nostalgia of the sorts you get for your teens and twenties is this: I was divorced from popular music. Not from popular culture, just the music. Early on in the 90s a switch flipped, and everything on the radio started to sound annoying or irrelevant, full of convictions I didn’t share. When that happens, memories lose their soundtracks. Maybe that’s it.

What were the sounds of the 90s? Here. I like quite a few. I remember listening to “All I Wanna Do” while watching the sun go down over Santa Monica Boulevard, which was a nice moment. I only remember “Buddy Holly” because the video came with a computer I bought. Otherwise, lots of songs whose artist had a made-up name with a hyphen, and “featured” two or three people of whom I was unaware.

I had the same reaction in the early 1990s to pop music’s change in tone as James did, but I attributed it to hunkering down in the business world, and turning my back for a time on a pop culture that I was previously saturated in. But in retrospect, while pop music was headed towards a blind alley back then, the movie industry had a pretty good run in the 1990s. On my shelves of DVDs and a few aging laser discs include the following titles from that era:

• Goodfellas
• The Crow
• Terminator 2
• Reservoir Dogs
• JFK
• The Fugitive
• True Lies
• Groundhog Day
• Apollo 13
• Pulp Fiction
• Schindler’s List
• Star Trek: First Contact
• Toy Story
• Austin Powers
• Starship Troopers
• Men In Black
• Dark City
• The Matrix

Yes, there’s plenty of nihilism in there, and particularly in the case of JFK, plenty of Manchurian Candidate-level paranoia. But all in all, the 1990s was a pretty good decade for popcorn-style summer movies and entertainment, and Hollywood and movie theater owners were rewarded accordingly. In 1997′s Air Force One, Hollywood asked for a president (played by Han Solo himself, Harrison Ford) who was a Vietnam-era veteran who knew his way around the business end of a jet airplane, and took no guff from terrorists. Two years later, George Clooney made Three Kings, in which he called out George H.W. Bush for not removing Saddam Hussein and finishing the job in Iraq.

Be careful what you wish for…

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James Carville has been endlessly quoted as saying that “Pennsylvania is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between.” Though perhaps we should add more than a little touch of Michigan into that mix as well. This new video from Reason.TV makes Harrisburg, the state’s capital, sound very much like Detroit:

The city of Harrisburg is Ground Zero for America’s municipal debt crisis.

Pennsylvania’s capital city has liabilities estimated at $610 million, which is nearly ten times its annual budget. The city is so deep in the red that last year it attempted to file for bankruptcy. Reckless spending did more than ruin Harrisburg’s balance sheet; it crowded out private industry and distracted from the city’s core functions. Today, Harrisburg is a dangerous, poverty-stricken city, with failing schools and a shrinking population.

Harrisburg’s fiscal nightmare may be a harbinger of things to come for American cities. In the mid-90s, local governments embarked on a spending binge, bringing total municipal debt in the United States to more than $2.8 trillion. Along with Harrisburg, Jefferson County, Alabama, Vallejo, California, and Central Falls, Rhode Island have filed for bankruptcy in the past few years. Several more cities are on the brink of default, largely thanks to taxpayer-financed stadiums, museums, housing, commercial complexes, other misconceived economic development projects, and runaway public sector salaries, pensions, and benefit packages.

Is your hometown the next Harrisburg?

Shot, edited, written, and produced by Jim Epstein, who also narrates.

It certainly makes for a bracing double-feature alongside Steven Crowder’s epic late 2009 video on Detroit’s woes for PJTV:

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“Left’s Attempt At Their Own ClimateGate Based on Forged Document?”, as pondered by Ace of Spades:

Megan McArdle was, to my knowledge, the first to raise red flags over the authenticity of documents from the Heartland Institute, supposedly showing them acting all evil and stuff about the climate.

Most of the documents are real and are fairly bland. But one memo is in dispute. This memo, by McArdle’s reading, seems written not from the point of view of a climate change skeptic — who would naturally see himself as the good guy — but from the point of view of a climate change zealot impersonating a climate change skeptic — and is thus written, oddly, as if the person doing the writing believes himself to be a bad guy.

(My own take: I skipped this because I think the Likely Forged Document itself is pretty bland, too. If this is an attempt at a takedown, it seems pretty subtle to me. But subsequent events seem to show that Megan McArdle was likely right and my lack of interest was likely wrong.)

5. The worldview is different. In my experience, climate skeptics see themselves as a beleaguered minority fighting for truth and justice against the powerful, and nearly monolithic, forces of the establishment. They are David, to the climate scientists’ Goliaths. This is basically what the authenticated documents sound like.The memo, by contrast, uses more negative language about the efforts it’s describing, while trying to sound like they think it’s positive. It’s like the opposition political manifestos found in novels written by stolid ideologues; they can never quite bear (or lack the imagination) to let the villains have a good argument. Switch the names, and the memo could have been a page ripped out of State of Fear or Atlas Shrugged.

Basically, it reads like it was written from the secret villain lair in a Batman comic. By an intern.

McArdle’s theory is that the real information (bland stuff about donors) was in fact obtained by some lefty, but it wasn’t juicy enough. So someone faked up a Memo, basically a digest of the information in the other documents (or through Google), but wrote about that information in the most negative way possible, in order to juice up a pretty weak leak.

Stacy McCain adds, “In Apologizing for Global Warming Hoax, Peter Gleick Blames His Victims”:

The Heartland Institute was victimized by global warming fanatics who published stolen documents and at least one forged document in their attempts to portray the Institute as dishonest.

One of the central figures in this criminal hoax was Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute, who uses the Huffington Post to offer an excuse:

My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved. Nevertheless I deeply regret my own actions in this case. I offer my personal apologies to all those affected.

“It’s not my fault!” The end justify the means: The alleged evil of their opponents excuses any shoddy smear Gleick and his allies may perpetrate against them. And despite their admitted amorality, they wonder why we doubt their claims to “science”?

If it turns out that Gleick had a 2012 RatherGate moment, it wouldn’t be the first time that radical environmentalism has cooked the books, as we’ll discuss on the following page.

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Back in 2001, actor Stanley Tucci told Variety magazine that HBO has “the biggest balls in the business.” Maybe so back then. These days? Not so much. As Bryon York asks in the Washington Examiner, why did HBO focus on only one-half of the best-selling look at the 2008 presidential election, Game Change, written by liberal political journalists John Heilemann and Mark Halperin? As York writes, “The other half would have made a great movie:”

And then there was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. What a great role the fiery preacher from Chicago would have made! “Game Change” — the book — reported that Obama and his top aides knew all along that Wright would be a problem, and yet did nothing about it until Wright’s “Goddamn America” sermon burst into the news.

The alternate “Game Change” could have featured top Clinton aide Harold Ickes’ suggestion that the campaign hire a private investigator to probe Obama’s connections to Wright. “This guy has been sitting in the church for twenty f–king years,” Ickes is quoted in the book as saying. “If you really want to take him down, let’s take him f–king down.” Screenwriter Danny Strong — he also worked on “Recount” — couldn’t have written it better himself.

The movie also could have focused on Hillary Clinton’s anger at Obama’s ability to escape the Wright mess unscathed. “Just imagine, just for fun, if my pastor from Arkansas said the kind of things his pastor said,” Clinton told aides, according to the book. “I’m just saying. Just imagine. This race would be over.”

Finally, the alternate “Game Change” could have focused on top Clinton strategist Mark Penn, the man who wrote campaign memos questioning Obama’s American identity. “Obama’s roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited,” Penn wrote, before concluding: “I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.”

It could have been an extraordinary look at the troubling issue of race playing out inside a party that takes pride in its civil rights record. The alternate “Game Change” could have been a complex picture of complex people in a complex situation.

And most of all, the alternate “Game Change” would have provided insights into the man who became president of the United States.

Instead, as York notes, “HBO decided to focus on an out-of-office, former half-term governor of Alaska who was on the losing ticket in the 2008 election and isn’t running for anything today.” Palin Derangement Syndrome strikes again.

In the last five years, Hollywood and TV networks have gotten the vapors over mini-series involving the Kennedys of a half-century ago, and the Clinton administration’s decisions (and the lack thereof) in fighting Osama bin Laden in the mid-1990s. How could they suddenly grow a pair of balls sufficient to properly cover both sides of a story as recent as 2008?

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The more things change at CBS…

Daniel Schorr’s passing on Friday, at age 93, reminded me of the kind of assaults CBS News unleashed on conservatives before there were any countervailing forums available. A 2001 Weekly Standard article (nine years in my “pending” file!) detailed a particularly vicious left-wing hit piece he narrated in 1964 which linked Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater with neo-Nazis in Germany, a CBS Evening News story notorious enough to earn a mention – if without any censure – in the New York Times and Washington Post obituaries.

In a June of 2001 Weekly Standard review of a memoir by Schorr about his years with CBS, CNN and NPR, Andrew Ferguson recited the piece which aired during the GOP’s convention:

“It looks as though Senator Goldwater, if nominated, will be starting his campaign here in Bavaria, center of Germany’s right wing” also known, Schorr added helpfully, as “Hitler’s one-time stomping ground.” Goldwater, he went on, had given an interview to Der Spiegel, “appealing to right-wing elements in Germany,” and had agreed to speak to a conclave of, yes, “right-wing Germans.” “Thus,” Schorr concluded, “there are signs that the American and German right wings are joining up.” Now back to you, Walter, and have a nice day!

Ferguson pointed out what eluded the Washington Post and New York Times: “Though easily checkable, it was false in all its particulars” and “was false in its obvious implication of an Anschluss between German neo-Nazis and U.S. Republicans.” Nonetheless, “if Schorr was embarrassed by the Goldwater episode, his memoir shows no signs of it.”

…The more they remain the same: “CBS accuses Santorum of comparing Obama to Hitler:”

Santorum makes the point of why the greatest generation is called the greatest generation, and it’s because they were there for American when it needed them, at a ‘time of great peril’, and they did great things. And his larger point from there is that we can be like the greatest generation because our country needs us right now.But this is where the MSM acts as though they don’t understand what he was saying. He then makes the point that the challenge we face now is not as clearly defined as was the challenge for the greatest generation, that is WWII. And yet still, even they sat on the sidelines for a year and a half while Germany plunged Europe into darkness. Why did they wait, he asks? He answers it this way:

Because we’re a hopeful people. We think, ‘Well, you know it’ll get better. Yeah, he’s a nice guy. I mean, it won’t be near as bad as what we think. This will be okay.’ I mean, yeah, maybe he’s not the best guy after a while, after a while you find out some things about this guy over in Europe and he’s not so good of a guy after all. ‘But you know what, why do we need to be involved? We’ll just take care of our own problems. We’ll get our families off to work and our kids off to school, yeah we’ll be ok‘. That’s sorta the optimistic spirit of America.

But sometimes, It’s not OK. It’s going to be harder for this generation to figure this out. There’s no cataclysmic event. It’s going to be hard.

You understand it, you’re here. You wouldn’t be here if you don’t get it. But what about the rest of America? Do they understand what is happening?

He’s really just comparing this generation to the greatest generation and why this situation is going to be harder for our generation to grasp. It’s that simple. There was no Hitler/Obama comparisons made.

Click over for the CBS article and the video of Santorum’s speech.

Silly Santorum — doesn’t he know that only lefties like Paul Krugman are allowed to use the Moral Equivalent of War argument?

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The day after Christmas of 2008, a New York Times editorial titled “The Gas Tax” was a lump of coal in every motorist’s stocking:

There are several ways to tax gas. One would be to devise a variable consumption tax in such a way that a gallon of unleaded gasoline at the pump would never go below a floor of $4 or $5 (in 2008 dollars), fluctuating to accommodate changing oil prices and other costs. Robert Lawrence, an economist at Harvard, proposes a variable tariff on imported oil to achieve the same effect and also to stimulate the development of domestic energy sources.

In both cases, the fuel taxes could be offset with tax credits to protect vulnerable segments of the population.

While oil prices are all but sure to rise again as the world emerges from recession, further tempering consumption with a gas tax would both slow the rise in the price of crude and steer more revenue from energy consumption to the United States budget, rather than that of oil-exporting countries.

A bitter recession is not the most opportune time to ratchet up the price of energy. But if the Obama administration is to meet its twin objectives of reducing the nation’s dependence on foreign oil and cutting its emissions of greenhouse gases, it needs to start thinking now about mechanisms to curb the nation’s demand for energy when the economy emerges from recession in the future.

This also would serve as a signal to American automakers and American drivers that the era of cheap gasoline is not going to last.

And now, with gasoline over $4.00 a gallon in California and rapidly approaching that key emotional price-point in other states, yesterday, the Times ran the following headline: “Rising Gas Prices Give G.O.P. Issue to Attack Obama:”

Rising gasoline prices, trumpeted in foot-tall numbers on street corners across the country, are causing concern among advisers to President Obama that a budding sense of economic optimism could be undermined just as he heads into the general election.

White House officials are preparing for Republicans to use consumer angst about the cost of oil and gas to condemn his energy programs and buttress their argument that his economic policies are not working.

In a closed-door meeting last week, Speaker John A. Boehner instructed fellow Republicans to embrace the gas-pump anger they find among their constituents when they return to their districts for the Presidents’ Day recess.

“This debate is a debate we want to have,” Mr. Boehner told his conference on Wednesday, according to a Republican aide who was present. “It was reported this week that we’ll soon see $4-a-gallon gas prices. Maybe higher. Certainly, this summer will see the highest gas prices in years. Your constituents saw those reports, and they’ll be talking about it.”

They’ll also be talking about a president who explicitly campaigned on raising energy prices in order to — as we’ve since found out — help create his “green” crony venture socialism failed business ventures such as Solyndra and Fisker (not to mention the disastrous Government Motors Volt). And blocked the Keystone XL pipeline to assuage his far left environmentalist base.

In 2008, the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC, and tacitly, the San Francisco Chronicle all supported the notion of the then-incoming President Obama raising energy prices on consumers. Have gas prices risen sufficiently “gradually” to benefit Mr. Obama reelection chances? The Times doesn’t seem to think so, despite having called for them to rise three and a half years ago.

(Via Newsbusters.)

Update: “In Vicious, Personal Attack, Rick Santorum Questions the President’s . . . Environmental Views:”

The comments came at an event in Columbus shortly after the former senator from Pennsylvania said efficacy and safety improvements in oil drilling technology are considered by the president to be “a dangerous technology.”

“It doesn’t fit his pattern of trying to drive down consumption, trying to drive up your cost of transportation to accomplish his political science goal of reducing carbon dioxide,” he said.

Obama, he continued, is not motivated by “your quality of life.”

“It’s not about your job. It’s about some phony ideal, some phony theology,” Santorum said. “Oh, not a theology based on the Bible, a different theology. But no less a theology.”

Environmentalism is an alternative religion? Gaia forfend!

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At Big Journalism, Ron Futrell explores the epic clusterfark that is the above headline:

The New York Knicks put together an amazing winning streak with Taiwanese basketball sensation Jeremy Lin when they finally lost a game last week. The ESPN headline;  ”Chink in the Armor” (see screen shot above).

The headline was up on the ESPN mobile website for 35 minutes and actually, it was the second time the network used that phrase with Lin. One of their sports anchors unbelievably used that identical phrase.

ESPN said it is, “conducting a complete review of our cross-platform editorial procedures and are determining appropriate disciplinary action to ensure this does not happen again. We regret and apologize for this mistake.”

ESPN has fired the person responsible for the racial slur on its mobile ap and suspended the news anchor for 30 days and the pledged to “be better in the future.”

Never forget, ESPN is the network that takes a holier-than-thou approach to race and sports. They are the arbiters of right and wrong and they will be the first to try to destroy anybody who gets close to saying or doing something they find politically incorrect. Just ask Rush Limbaugh. He was forced to resign from ESPN when he went after the Philadelphia media for their coverage of Donovan McNabb. ESPN thought what he said was politically incorrect and he was gone. The words “controversial” and “racially insensitive” were used in regards to Limbaugh’s criticism of the Philadelphia media. When you set that bar at that level, you’d better be able to live up to it yourself.

Live TV can be tough and mistakes can be made, I’ve seen plenty of firings in a heartbeat over statements much less egregious. I’m proud that I’ve done 30 years live TV and radio without having anything like this ever happen, so I know first-hand the challenges of putting out a lot of live product in a hurry where you are the only filter. I had zero tolerance with myself and I met that standard.

How about the rest of the Activist Old Media? How will they react to this racial slur? Certainly, coverage would be extensive were ESPN not “one of their own.” ESPN is owned by ABC and I’ll betcha tickets to the next Knicks game that the “Mother Ship” won’t be covering this story.

Based on how NBC’s Tom Brokaw and the late Peter Jennings of ABC circled the wagons in defense of Dan Rather in the fall of 2004, that seems like an awfully safe bet.

Update: Live by identity politics, die by them as well: “Suspended ESPN Anchor [Max Bretos]: Hey, My Wife is Asian, So What’s the Big Deal About the Jeremy Lin ‘Chink’ Gag?”

More: “Jeremy Lin headline slur was ‘honest mistake,’ fired ESPN editor Anthony Federico claims.”

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“Grandpa … What are Those Towers?”, blogger Cjunk asks at Small Dead Animals:

“They are eco-ruins, Sarah.”

“What’s an eco-ruin Grandpa?”

Well my little darling, let me tell you a story:

I don’t think I’ll mind Eco-ruins. It will be fun to point them out on hikes with kids and explain what it was like back in the late 1900′s. “The best part kids, is that they thought they were smarter than everyone else. They would get so mad if anyone said different. Look at their big schemes now. Every time you pay the government, just remember that its to pay for these rusting monuments.”

In the meantime though, as Robert Bryce writes at City Journal, “It’s time to stop wasting land and resources in the name of environmentalism,” and “Get Dense.”

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Di-Gel won’t cure them, as Steve Hayward writes at Power Line:

Meanwhile, the Times notes in its lead story that rising gasoline prices may present a political problem for Obama.  Now this is a curious story, for several reasons.  First, Obama, like all right-thinking greenies, want gasoline prices to be higher, though, to be sure, they want high prices brought about by a government tax rather than the marketplace.  High gas prices are no fun if it means more profits for private oil companies.  Obama admitted this directly when asked about high gas prices in 2008, when he said he didn’t have a problem with them, only that he “would have preferred a gradual adjustment.”  Well, prices have crept up gradually since they collapsed back to about $2 a gallon in 2008.  So what’s his problem?

Similarly, what’s the Times’ problem? Like Tom Brokaw of NBC and the Washington Post, the New York Times begged the CEO of the Office of the President Elect back in late 2008 for higher gas prices; why should they be concerned about the one campaign promise he’s actually kept?

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Back in 2010, when Keith Olbermann was still on MSNBC, before he wore out his welcome at yet another cable network, we had a lot of fun comparing his fire and brimstone style to another hypocritical podium thumper,  Sinclair Lewis’ 1920s Elmer Gantry character. But while Keith has since left MSNBC for even lower ratings,  that old-time religion continues to emanate from the GE subsidiary’s studios:

MSNBC’s newest host, leftist professor Melissa Harris-Perry debuts Saturday morning, creating an actual four-hour block for the radicals at The Nation magazine. Harris-Perry is on the cover of this week’s Metro Weekly, a gay D.C. news magazine. At the end of the interview with Chris Geidner, there’s this whopper: her bible is written by Al Sharpton and Rachel Maddow.

“Undoubtedly, a little bit of both. Look, I love Politics Nation with Al Sharpton and The Rachel Maddow Show. And, I can’t think of two shows on the same network that are more different in tone and content.” Then she said: “I see them as my Old Testament and New Testament. I really need them both. I need to smite my enemies, and I need to understand them. And then I need to smite them, and then understand them. I probably will do a little bit of both on my show.”

But how can MSNBC be the Old and New Testament, when there’s the New York Times, and Jill Abramson, its latest editor, who famously said last year:

Ms. Abramson said that as a born-and-raised New Yorker, she considered being named editor of The Times to be like “ascending to Valhalla.”

“In my house growing up, The Times substituted for religion,” she said. “If The Times said it, it was the absolute truth.”

The paper of “absolute truth” quickly airbrushed out the above uber-embarrassing quote from its then-incoming editor’s press release. But still, as Daniel J. Flynn wrote in 2008′s A Conservative History of the American Left:

Before the religious Right, there was a religious Left. The twentieth-century American Left got ideas from Karl Marx; the nineteenth-century American Left, from Jesus Christ.

“Religious Left” strikes contemporary ears as an oxymoron. Could Michael Moore, Bill Maher, or Susan Sarandon venture inside a church without melting? There are the reverends Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Barry Lynn, but they preach politics. The hostility to religion often associated with the Left was not always so pronounced. Indeed, Christianity once served as the primary influence upon American leftists. Its influence on early American leftists was so profound that it put its stamp on their decidedly irreligious offspring. Secular reformers admired the sacrifice and the communal unity of the early religious fanatics but not, generally, the religious beliefs. Religion and politics mixed in the Social Gospel, whose enthusiasts ultimately reached for more social, less gospel. What emerged was a political religion, or, perhaps more accurately, a religious politics. The secular kept the forms without the function. They promised salvation, exalted saints, pursued heretics, revered holy books, enforced dogma, viewed history teleologically, and acted with a self-righteousness generally confined to the elect and an ends-justifies-the-means mentality characteristic of millennial deliverers. They lost faith in God, but not faith itself.

Or to paraphrase Mark Knopfler, two women say their “news” organizations are Jesus. One of them must be wrong.

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With various colleges determined to really emphasize the “liberal” half of the phrase “liberal arts” by offering courses on Occupy Wall Street, in the Wall Street Journal, Glenn Reynolds proffers “A Syllabus for the ‘Occupy’ Movement.” No word yet if he’ll be teaching this course himself at the University of Tennessee in the fall:

Schools from New York’s Columbia to Chicago’s Roosevelt University are offering courses on the “Occupy” movement. This has inspired some derision from the right, but I think that derision is misplaced. There is much that a course on the Occupy movement might profitably cover. Here are some possible lessons:

1) The Higher Education Bubble and Debt Slavery Throughout History. Since ancient times, debt has been a tool used by rulers to enslave the ruled, which is why the Bible explains that the borrower is the slave to the lender. One complaint of many Occupy protesters involves their pursuit of expensive degrees that has left them burdened by student loans but unable to find suitable employment. This unit would compare the marketing of higher education and student debt to today’s students with the techniques used to lure sharecroppers and coal miners into irredeemable indebtedness. Music to be provided by Tennessee Ernie Ford.

Heh, indeed. Read the whole thing.®

The really sharp professor will remind his students of the postmodern irony overload of their running up student loans to learn more about a protest about (among other things) running up their student loans.

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As Ace writes, “I’ve said this forever, but the Democrats can’t speak a plan aloud, because there are only two options:”

1. Reduce benefits, which they don’t want to do, as they’re playing Mediscare yet again.

2. Massively increase the tax burdens on the middle class, which they claim they don’t want to do, but they do. All of their schemes rely on pulling more money from the middle class which is, as Willie Sutton said of banks, “where the money is.”

I actually think the Democrats want a crisis, because in crisis, the politically impossible becomes merely the politically unpalatable.

Yesterday’s infamous run-in between Geithner and Ryan brought dueling potential quotes of the year. First up:

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, speaking on behalf of the Obama White House, to Rep. Paul Ryan: “You are right to say we’re not coming before you today to say ‘we have a definitive solution to that long term problem.’ What we do know is, we don’t like yours.”

And then there was this:

GEITHNER: You could have taken [the chart] out [to the year] 3000 or to 4000. [Laughs]

RYAN: Yeah, right. We cut it off at the end of the century because the economy, according to the CBO, shuts down in 2027 on this path.

No word yet if Mr. Obama and his fellow Democrats view that as a bug or a feature.

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From Brian Lamb’s 2000 C-Span Booknotes interview with Peter Hitchens (Christopher’s brother) concerning his then-new book, The Abolition of Britain: From Winston Churchill to Princess Diana:

BRIAN LAMB: One of the things in your book, you have as a subtitle, “From Winston Churchill to Princess Di”–or Princess Diana. Why did you bracket this book between Winston Churchill’s death and Princess Di’s death?

PETER HITCHENS: The crucial chapter and really the point around which the whole book revolves is the one which compares the two funerals of Winston Churchill in 1965 and Princess Diana. And the difference between them seems to me to sum up very eloquently the way in which the country has changed; the difference in the self-discipline of the people and their attitudes, the way in which the two things were …(unintelligible). It’s obviously two very different kinds of people, but here were two funerals in London of revered and much-loved figures. And they were utterly different, as if they’d taken place in different countries, and, in fact, they had taken place in different countries. The Britain of Princess Diana was an utterly foreign place to the Britain of Winston Churchill. And it seemed to me to be a good starting point.

This actually came to me during the bizarre weeks after Princess Diana’s death, when voicing any kind of criticism of the hysteria was pretty much taboo. And I did the sort of thing that Chinese dissidents used to do in the days of Mao Tse-tung. If they wanted to write about a political controversy, they’d actually write about one that had taken place in some dynasty 3,000 or 4,000 years before which they felt paralleled it. And I wrote about Winston Churchill’s funeral to make the points that it had been so different. And everybody got the message.

LAMB: What were the differences?

Mr. HITCHENS: The differences are in–first of all, in the open showing of emotion. Now some people might say let it all hang out, show exactly what you feel. The trouble is that, in the case of British people, if they let it all hang out, quite a lot of what they let hang out isn’t very nice. We are a pretty bloodthirsty and violent lot, especially when we get outside out own borders and start misbehaving. And we need to restrain ourselves. And one of the reasons we’ve been so peaceful for so long is that we have. That was very much in evidence at the Churchill funeral and very much less in evidence at the Diana funeral when people applauded, for heaven’s sake, at a funeral, which is completely un-English, whereas in Churchill’s time, people queueing up to file past his coffin might occasionally dash a tear away from an eye and consider that to be slightly embarrassing. That’s one difference.

And the other differences were really in the whole shape and face of the country. Britain in 1965 was still a serious country, still scarred by what was seen by most people as a recent war, still very much a country living in the afterglow of imperial greatness, also quite a lot poorer and, in some ways, the better for it in that the self-indulgence which comes with affluence hadn’t really begun to take hold. And this whole feeling of a country self-disciplined for a serious purpose as opposed to a frivolous country weeping and wailing about a princess who was really a glorified film star with a crown on her head.

Flash-forward to 12 years later in the Colonies, where New Jersey’s Gov. Chris Christie has ordered the flags to fly at half-staff in honor of Whitney Houston. Like Peter Hitchens in the late 1990s, Jazz Shaw of Hot Air is not amused:

There’s no sense sugar coating this, so let’s get straight to it. Whitney Houston was not unknown to me, though I never saw the movie “The Bodyguard.” She had one heck of a set of pipes. But at the same time, she wasn’t kidnapped and murdered by terrorists. She died under some set of circumstances which the police are not yet even listing as suspicious. She had a troubled marriage and a history of problems with drugs and alcohol. Neither of these things make her any better or worse than the rest of us, though it is still tragic when someone passes at such a young age.

Lowering the flags for her? She was a singer. As the WCHS report notes, after researching previous executive orders, the flags were not lowered for Frank Sinatra. In fact, the first “celebrity” person (as opposed to military or elected leaders) for whom the flags were lowered was Clarence Clemons, and that was done by Christie also. (For the record, I’m a HUGE fan of The Boss and the Big Man, but never heard that he had lowered the flags for Clemons, which I would have objected to as well.)

Lowering the flags for national disasters, etc. is fine. But for this? Whitney Houston was a wealthy woman who achieved fantastic success in the field of opportunity which is America. She was a great singer. She died in a tragic fashion as far too many Americans do. But this is not a national tragedy.

This is getting far too much like the recent decision to name a US Navy warship after Gabby Giffords. I’ve been a huge supporter of her tremendous effort to come back after that horrific attack, but naming a ship after her? We have a massive list of dead Marines who are in line first. I’m just saying we need to keep our priorities in order.

The England of 1965, the date of Churchill’s death, was already in decline, having surrendered most of its colonies in the aftermath of World War II, and had already begun the process of replacing empire building with the narcotic of pop culture. Over the next few decades, it would  jump from the happy, cheerful nihilism of the Swinging London of the mid-1960s, to the grim, gobbing nihilism of punk rock a decade later, to the maudlin demise of Princess Diana, as Hitchens wrote above. What does America’s recent pop culture trifecta — the election of a president who struck rock star poses in 2008, and the Diana-style death cults in the wake of first Michael Jackson and now Whitney Houston portend for our own future. Or the lack thereof?

Related: “Whitney Houston’s fans will be given a virtual front-row seat for what’s shaping up to be a star-studded funeral,” New York’s NBC affiliate breathlessly observes. “Houston’s publicist, Kristen Foster, announced Wednesday that The Associated Press will be allowed a camera at Saturday’s private service at New Hope Baptist Church in Newark, NJ,” and that it will be streamed live online.

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Every generation gets the media it deserves. In the 1950s, there was Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, decades before the conspiracy theories kicked in. Today’s media? Goodnight and good luck, indeed. First up, the generally left-leaning Media Bistro finally calls Keith Olbermann’s number:

When Big Journalism Contributor Lee Stranahan complied all the rape and sexual assault stories about Occupy in one post for the world to see, you’d think that would’ve been the end of it. But Olbermann’s ego won’t allow anyone to have the last word on anything, so he “debunked” each one, one by one.

Unfortunately for Keith, the Breitbart websites are not the silent, wallflower types even if their writing is sometimes abominable.

In his “debunking,” Olbermann changed his tune from “No Occupy rapes” to “Because almost none of the allegations are of rape and most of this list are duplicated…” to “2 stories duplicated” to “Occupy MEMBERS were victims.” That’s quite a journey in just one day, especially without ever acknowledging his position completely changed.

Even still, where he ended up, that the victims and not the perpetrators were the only Occupy people involved in these rapes and sexual assaults, isn’t the truth. After Olbermann’s “debunking, Stranahan was back a few hours later with a section by section debunking of what Olbermann said. Keith then went silent, maybe to bed, maybe to play with his baseball cards, or maybe to Stuart Smalley in the mirror to calm his nerves.

Hey, say what you will about the man behind Stuart Smalley; while Olbermann’s inability to play well with others during recess has driven him further and further into the bowels of cable media (from ESPN to MSNBC to CurrentTV aren’t exactly steps upward on the ol’ CV), Al Franken’s particular brand of idiocy took him from Saturday Night Live to the halls of the U.S. Senate. From that perspective, Al did OK playing a pretend journalist on “Weekend Update.”

And speaking of pretend journalists, Jon Stewart, dubbed “the most trusted man in America” and “the most-respected journalist in America” by his fellow Obama worshipers in the MSM* has a moment of clarity, regarding a fellow postmodern poseur. Hey Rube!, as the Professor would say:

”I don’t know if he’s going to re-elect us. I worry about Obama. … I get the sense with Obama, he doesn’t really like us all that much. He’s kind of had his fill.

But it’s just a moment, before Jon quickly retreats to the warm innervating afterglow of 2008:

He’s the only president I’ve ever seen who begins each press conference with a heavy sigh. … [Bush] was the kid in sixth grade who gave the book report about a book he clearly hadn’t read. … Obama is the kid who has read the book in first grade and he can’t believe you idiots are just getting around to it.”

Well, that’s what he wants you to think, but until he actually releases his grades (among the many known-unknowns of BO’s bio), why should we believe he’s smarter than George W. Bush — who after all is smarter than Obama’s 2004 media-created prototype?

To paraphrase a certain fictional starship captain** I’m laughing (to keep from crying) at the results of the superior intellect:

Besides, if it’s brainpower you want, Obama’s got plenty just down the hall:

* Which tells you all you need to know about the “real” journalists in the MSM. Not that there are many left.

** As opposed to the non-fictional starship captains…

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