“Nobody is challenging Barack Obama in the Democratic primaries this year–and is doing surprisingly well,” James Taranto writes in his Best of the Web column:

One of the reasons some commentators thought Obama would be a shoo-in for re-election is that like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, he drew no serious primary opposition as an incumbent president. By contrast, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Bush père were challenged by Reagan, Ted Kennedy and Pat Buchanan respectively. Lyndon Johnson abandoned his 1968 re-election bid after Eugene McCarthy’s surprisingly strong showing in New Hampshire and Robert F. Kennedy’s late entry.

The theory goes that presidents lose re-election when they have a strong primary opponent and win when they don’t. This requires treating Buchanan as a “serious” opponent, even though he didn’t win a single primary in 1992 and his best showing, in New Hampshire, was 37%.

Writing at RealClearPolitics, the delightfully named Sean Trende reformulates the rule and carries it back a century: “There are only seven sitting presidents who have ever received less than 60 percent of the vote in any primary: Taft in ’12; Coolidge, ’24; Hoover, ’32; LBJ, ’68; Ford ’76; Carter, ’80; and Bush ’92. All of these presidents, with the exception of Coolidge, were not re-elected.” One of Coolidge’s challengers, Robert LaFollette, ran a third-party challenge. He ended up with 16.5% of the nationwide popular vote and carried his home state, Wisconsin.

Actually, there’s an eighth sitting president who received less than 60% in a primary–in more than one, in fact. That would be Obama in ’12, who, as Trende points out, received just 58.4% in Arkansas, 57.9% in Kentucky, 57.1% in Oklahoma and 59.4% in West Virginia. In Kentucky, his main opponent was “Uncommitted,” another name for Nobody.

If the Trende trend is predictive–admittedly, a big if–Obama is much likelier than not to lose in November. “I think we can reasonably begin to view this as a sort of organic primary challenge to Obama,” Trende writes. “Obama’s not likely to lose any states outright in the primaries; think of this more like Buchanan’s run against George H.W. Bush in 1992.”

At Big Journalism, John Nolte adds:

I’m old enough to remember the weeks-long narrative the media created around Pat Buchanan’s 37% showing in New Hampshire against then-President George H.W. Bush in 1992. The media used this result to tag Bush as a loser, an incumbent in trouble and unable to hold on to his base. This was all part of a bigger narrative the media was crafting to peg Bush as out-of-touch. Perot eventually won the election for Bill Clinton, but this certainly didn’t help.

Though today’s media won’t admit it, the difference between 1992 and 2012 is a big one and not good news for Obama.  Buchanan was a legitimate insurgent candidate; after years as a columnist and television commenter, Buchanan was  a known quantity with a serious campaign platform and access to all kinds of media coverage. Meanwhile, Obama is losing a larger percentage of the vote to inmates and relatively unknown attorneys. Moreover, Obama is losing nearly one in five votes to the likes of  “uncommitted.”

In 1992, many Republicans voted for Buchanan. In 2012, a whole lot of Democrats are voting against Barack Obama. The closest the Post comes to acknowledging Obama’s troubles is with this:

Regardless of the reasoning, it’s clear that there is a bloc of Democratic voters in every state who want to register their opposition to Obama. … even a minor abandonment of Obama by self-identified Democrats could make a difference this time around.

It’s pretty obvious that the media is desperate to avoid narratives surrounding Obama’s glaring problems with his base. After all, with the economy going in the wrong direction and all of the very public Bain Capital rebellion (the centerpiece of Obama’s re-election strategy), Obama has enough problems.

As a result, Roger L. Simon asks today, “Is Liberalism Dead?”

They will literally do anything or say anything to maintain control.  They will even contradict everything they stand for to survive.

You can really see this in action at CNN. In February of 2010, the network literally baked a cake (surprisingly, Michelle Obama never scolded them about this high-calorie sugary treat) to celebrate the spending binge of the first year of Obama’s “Stimulus” program. Today they’re simply cooking the books.  Just as they did in 2008 by building the Wright Free Zone, “CNN Fails to Refute Bogus Numbers Claiming ‘Obama Spending Binge Never Happened,’” Newsbusters reports.

Which is why, as Doug Ross writes we can watch in real time as “Old Media Is Bleeding Out Right Before Our Eyes.”

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As Prager writes, “The Left craves power not money, and that makes it much more frightening:”*

You cannot understand the Left if you do not understand that leftism is a religion. It is not God-based (some left-wing Christians’ and Jews’ claims notwithstanding), but otherwise it has every characteristic of a religion. The most blatant of those characteristics is dogma. People who believe in leftism have as many dogmas as the most fundamentalist Christian.

One of them is material equality as the preeminent moral goal. Another is the villainy of corporations. The bigger the corporation, the greater the villainy. Thus, instead of the devil, the Left has Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, Big Oil, the “military-industrial complex,” and the like. Meanwhile, Big Labor, Big Trial Lawyers, and — of course — Big Government are left-wing angels.

And why is that? Why, to be specific, does the Left fear big corporations but not big government?

The answer is dogma — a belief system that transcends reason. No rational person can deny that big governments have caused almost all the great evils of the last century, arguably the bloodiest in history. Who killed the 20 to 30 million Soviet citizens in the Gulag Archipelago — big government or big business? Hint: There were no private businesses in the Soviet Union. Who deliberately caused 75 million Chinese to starve to death — big government or big business? Hint: See previous hint. Did Coca-Cola kill 5 million Ukrainians? Did Big Oil slaughter a quarter of the Cambodian population? Would there have been a Holocaust without the huge Nazi state?

Whatever bad things big corporations have done is dwarfed by the monstrous crimes — the mass enslavement of people, the deprivation of the most basic human rights, not to mention the mass murder and torture and genocide — committed by big governments.

How can anyone who thinks rationally believe that big corporations rather than big governments pose the greatest threat to humanity? The answer is that it takes a mind distorted by leftist dogma. If there is another explanation, I do not know what it is.

In The Tyranny of Cliches, Jonah Goldberg wrote:

When man loses God he sets about to make new gods. Or as the philosopher Eric Voegelin puts it, “[ W] hen God is invisible behind the world, the contents of the world will become new gods; when the symbols of transcendent religiosity are banned, new symbols develop from the inner-worldly language of science to take their place.”

Likewise man creates dogmas because man needs dogmas. The light of reason illuminates the darkness and science provides us compasses to find our way. But it does not provide us with reasons to get out of bed in the first place. As John Dos Passos said, “The mind cannot support moral chaos for long. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave webs.”

You can hear more from Dennis Prager in the latest edition of the Ricochet podcast.

* And how.

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Having just declared Mr. Obama “The First Gay President,” Tina Brown’s Daily Beastweek is now angrily envisioning the GOP’s emotionally manipulative campaign “to tell women they shamelessly indulged in Obama in ’08:”

According to a new ABC News/Washington Post poll released this week, Romney is gaining on Obama’s favorability amongst women at a surprisingly rapid pace. The report indicates that the 19-point lead that the president enjoyed last month has diminished to a mere 7-point advantage in recent weeks.

What gives?

How about an emotionally manipulative, unapologetically condescending, Karl-Rove-concocted messaging strategy that preys on women’s weakness for instantly gratifying experiences coupled with their propensity for self-blame?

In effect, the right is framing Barack Obama as a guilty pleasure, saying to women—or, at the very least, implying—that the fairer sex indulged in his campaign with shameless abandon in 2008 and now they should be atoning in equal proportion.

It’s as if the president were a heedlessly devoured tub of triple-caramel-chunk cookie-dough ice cream that has left a bad taste in your mouth, not to mention a few extra inches on your waistline, and needs to be traded for the presidential equivalent of a rice cake (Romney).

Obama as a guilty pleasure? Where on earth would women have gotten that idea?

The other night I dreamt of Barack Obama. He was taking a shower right when I needed to get into the bathroom to shave my legs, and then he was being yelled at by my husband, Max, for smoking in the house. It was not clear whether Max was feeling protective of the president’s health or jealous because of the cigarette.

The other day a friend of mine confided that in the weeks leading up to the election, the Obamas’ apparent joy as a couple had made her just miserable. Their marriage looked so much happier than hers. Their life seemed so perfect. “I was at a place where I was tempted daily to throttle my husband,” she said. “This coincided with Michelle saying the most beautiful things about Barack. Each time I heard her speak about him I got tears in my eyes — because I felt so far away from that kind of bliss in my own life and perhaps even more, because I was so moved by her expressions of devotion to him. And unlike previous presidential couples, they are our age, have children the same age and (just imagine the stress of daily life on the campaign) by all accounts should have been fighting even more than we were.”

As we all know, in journalism, two anecdotes are just one short of a national trend. I figured that my friend and I couldn’t possibly be the only ones dreaming, brooding or otherwise obsessing about the Obamas. Were other people, I wondered, being possessed by our new first family?

I launched an e-mail inquiry. And learned that they were. Often, in strikingly similar ways.

Many women — not too surprisingly — were dreaming about sex with the president. In these dreams, the women replaced Michelle with greater or lesser guilt or, in the case of a 62-year-old woman in North Florida, whose dream was reported to me by her daughter, found a fully above-board solution: “Michelle had divorced Barack because he had become ‘too much of a star.’ He then married my mother, who was oh so proud to be the first lady,” the daughter wrote me.

– “Sometimes a President Is Just a President,” Judith Warner, February 5th, 2009, the New York Times.

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In the latest issue of City Journal, Rudy Giuliani looks back at the career of James Q. Wilson and explores the enormous dept that New York City owes the late sociologist:

In the early days of Rudy University, we met with George Kelling, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, who, with James Q. Wilson, had written an article called “Broken Windows” in the March 1982 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. I had worked closely with Wilson in 1981, when he was cochair of the Task Force on Violent Crime and I was the associate attorney general. In New York, during the 1980s and 1990s, local government seemed to have conceded defeat. The city would actually put up stickers of plants and venetian blinds in the windows of abandoned buildings to disguise the decay. But Wilson had a revelation about crime: focus on the small crimes, such as littering, and keep neighborhoods clean and free of signs of disorder, such as broken windows in a building. The big idea was this: if the neighborhood looks as if someone is watching and maintaining order, it is far more likely that order will prevail. A neighborhood that is clean and well-ordered sends a signal to criminals and citizens alike.

Contrast the above with the video in a new post from Jim Treacher at the Daily Caller: “Watch Occupiers smash up San Francisco’s Mission District as the cops look on helplessly:”

Keep in mind that this video was uploaded by one of the irrepressible scamps involved. They’re proud of this.Yeah, man, don’t mess with the SFPD, or they’ll… um… drive away slowly. Has Internal Affairs investigated the officer who dared to turn on his siren, thus impinging on these children’s right to free speech?

And I was ready to congratulate the one kid who tried to talk some sense into the rest of him, until I realized he was okay with smashing up other people’s property as long as they’re above a certain income level.

These idiots did more property damage in one night than the Tea Party has done to date. Remember, though: Occupy is “mostly peaceful.” Just look at all the windows they didn’t smash. Look at all the walls they didn’t spray-paint. Look at all the police stations they didn’t vandalize.

And Mr. Obama, the once and future community organizer, still has their back. You never know when you need to supply the pitchforks.

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Gaffe-o-matic Marion Barry:

At a news conference after the meeting, Barry and several Asian American leaders sought to present a united front, saying that the dialogue is an important step toward defusing long-standing tension between blacks and Asians. Asked about the underlying sources of the conflict, Barry said the United States “has had racial tensions since it was founded.”

“The Irish caught hell, the Jews caught hell, the Polacks caught hell,” Barry said, invoking a word that Polish people have viewed as disparaging. “We want Ward 8 to be the model of diversity.”

Asked later about his reference to “Polacks,” Barry at first denied using the word, then retracted it, saying, “I meant Poles.”

His remark prompted a demand from Gary Kenzer, executive director of the Chicago-based Polish American Association, that Barry “apologize to the Polish American community of this country.”

“You wouldn’t say a derogatory statement to an African American, a Jewish American, and we deserve the same respect,” he said.

Note that while the Washington Post did headline the story “Marion Barry commits new gaffe while apologizing to Asians,” it took them seven paragraphs to actually get to the P-word. This is in sharp contradistinction to the paper’s Bletchley Park-level of ability to discern racism as the cause of even the slightest twitch of bad news involving President Obama.

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On Sunday, I flashed back to the Morgenthau Plan. As I wrote, it was a scheme for post-World War II Germany that was viciously punitive, if understandably so, and crafted by Henry Morgenthau, Jr., FDR’s  Treasury secretary, around 1944, designed to de-industrialize Germany, to prevent another outbreak of war:

The memorandum concluded “is looking forward to converting Germany into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character.”

As that Wikipedia page goes on to note, cooler heads eventually prevailed after the war. Otherwise, just as East Germany traded one totalitarian regime for another, West Germany would have traded the nightmare of Hitler’s scorched earth policy when he knew the war was lost for the Allies’ own scorched earth policy afterwards. Wikipedia quotes former president Herbert Hoover, who reminded advocates of the Morgenthau Plan in 1947 that “There is the illusion that the New Germany left after the annexations can be reduced to a ‘pastoral state’. It cannot be done unless we exterminate or move 25,000,000 people out of it.” West Germany would go on to become an industrial powerhouse, albeit one with a US military base located within it, just in case…

At the Climate Policy Network today, “Green Energy Transition: Germany Fears De-Industrialisation,” translates a page from Handelsblatt, a German business newspaper:

As a result of Germany’s green energy transition, electricity prices are exploding. Consumers and businesses are paying the price while Germany faces gradual de-industrialisation. Economists estimate that the cost of the green energy transition will total 170 billion Euros by 2020. This is more than double of what Germany would have to write off if Greece were to withdraw from the monetary union. “The de-industrialization has already begun,” the EU Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger has warned.

Meanwhile, those on the left who enjoy Earth Hour, an annual celebratory preview of the joys of de-industrialization cooked up in 2007 by the World Wildlife Fund and Australia’s Fairfax Media Limited, should hightail it to Detroit, where the lamps will be going off all over the town, according to Bloomberg News: “Half of Detroit’s Streetlights May Go Out as City Shrinks.” And Detroit isn’t the only failed Blue city where this is occurring:

Detroit, whose 139 square miles contain 60 percent fewer residents than in 1950, will try to nudge them into a smaller living space by eliminating almost half its streetlights.

As it is, 40 percent of the 88,000 streetlights are broken and the city, whose finances are to be overseen by an appointed board, can’t afford to fix them. Mayor Dave Bing’s plan would create an authority to borrow $160 million to upgrade and reduce the number of streetlights to 46,000. Maintenance would be contracted out, saving the city $10 million a year.

Other U.S. cities have gone partially dark to save money, among them Colorado Springs; Santa Rosa, California; and Rockford, Illinois. Detroit’s plan goes further: It would leave sparsely populated swaths unlit in a community of 713,000 that covers more area than Boston, Buffalo and San Francisco combined. Vacant property and parks account for 37 square miles (96 square kilometers), according to city planners.

“You have to identify those neighborhoods where you want to concentrate your population,” said Chris Brown, Detroit’s chief operating officer. “We’re not going to light distressed areas like we light other areas.”

Detroit’s dwindling income and property-tax revenue have required residents to endure unreliable buses and strained police services throughout the city. Because streetlights are basic to urban life, deciding what areas to illuminate will reshape the city, said Kirk Cheyfitz, co-founder of a project called Detroit143 — named for the 139 square miles of land, plus water — that publicizes neighborhood issues.

Naturally, the Obama administration views both the 21st century Morganthau Plan in Germany and Detroit’s lights-out policy as how-to guides, not warnings.

Because he’s so real world, you know.

Update: At the Tatler, Bryan Preston writes, “If a private enterprise decided on its own not to service certain parts of a city, we would never hear the end of it. But government doing it is ok. The victims of all this will just keep voting the same people back into office decade after decade.”

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Bryan Preston, last night at the Tatler: “They’re Going to Blame This on Racism:”

In Kentucky, “uncommitted” kept things interesting in the Democratic primary tonight. Obama won, 57-42. But he was running against air.

The results come on the heels of West Virginia’s Democratic primary earlier this monthwhere a felon incarcerated in Texas took 41 percent of the vote from the president.

In Kentucky, Obama did get more total votes than presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney, who won the GOP primary with almost 67 percent of the vote.

Obama had more than 118,600 votes to Romney’s approximately 117,100.

“They’ll blame the Arkansas result on racism, too,” Bryan concluded, in an update to his post.”

Headline today at the Washington Post, “Kentucky, Arkansas primaries: Is it racism?”

No, none of these Democrats are willing to put their name to that allegation — either generally or for this story. But, it is, without question the prevalent viewpoint they hold privately.

They argue that conservative white Democrats — particularly those in the South and Appalachia — don’t want to vote for an African American for president and, therefore, are willing to cast a ballot for almost anyone else up to and including an incarcerated felon. (Keith Judd, we are looking at you.)

The problem with that theory is that it’s almost entirely unprovable because it relies on assuming knowledge about voter motivations that — without being a mindreader — no one can know.

“There’s no easy or simple answer,” said Cornell Belcher, president of Brilliant Corners, a Democratic polling firm. “One man’s racial differences is another man’s cultural differences.”

What we know beyond a shadow of a doubt is that Appalachia and portions of the South — particularly those states without large African American populations — have long been hostile to President Obama.

Why seems kind of an odd thing to say, as Bryan notes in a See I Told You So post today, linking to a Politico article today with the same JournoList-style leftwing spin on last night’s results:

You Christian wingnuts just can’t stand a black man. We have a troll here who trots that argument out in comments with mind-numbing routine. And they’re right of course, unless you count Allen West, who is a conservative hero. And Clarence Thomas. And Thomas Sowell, and once upon a time, Colin Powell and Alan Keyes etc and etc. Except for them, and J. C. Watts, the former Oklahoma congressman, southerners can’t stand a black man holding office.

At the Wizbang blog, Michael Laprarie describes the WaPo’s headline as a classic example of the “have you stopped beating your wife yet?” style of argument:

Naturally the article brings up the infamous “Bigot Belt” graphic that showed Redneckland to be the only area of the nation that rejected Barack Obama outright in 2008.  Certainly it wasn’t Obama’s elitism, or his anti-Americanism, or his sleazy Chicago cronies, or his youthful infatuation with cocaine and Marxist professors, or his long-time association with a radical domestic terrorist, or his membership in a church led by one of the most inflammatory Black separatist pastors in the country.  Nah, it couldn’t possibly be any of those things that disinterested voters in the South.  It must be because he is half African.  Because that’s all we ever think about down here.

You know what?  I’m actually kinda proud of that map.  Seems we Okies ain’t as dumb as they think we is.

Not surprisingly, Ace has lots of fun with the WaPo story:

A former House member named Tom Cole has an explanation that doesn’t seem to have occurred to the Washington Post’s Racism Decision Desk.

“Obama fares poorly in states like Oklahoma, Kentucky and Arkansas because he has nothing in common with them. They are rural, he is urban. They are populist, he is elitist. And in case anyone hadn’t noticed, they are conservative while he is liberal. That isn’t just true of Republicans in these states. It is true of Democrats as well.”

That’s just silly.

On the other hand, Donna Brazie finally strikes on the answer. Or, rather, all three of them.

“Race, resentment [and] fear[.]“

There you go.

So, if those are the reasons, why does this moron then continue…

“Democrats have not had any messaging in those states for more than a decade. It’s hard to get voters to like you or even know you when all they hear is negative stuff.”

Ah. So the Democrats have no messaging there. (It’s always about their messaging, never about their policy and agenda.)

But even that last item isn’t true as Newsbusters notes, deconstructing a CNN contributor’s remarks, apparently built upon the same talking points:

CNN contributor Maria Cardona may have forgotten some history as she tried to spin away President Obama’s troubles in the Arkansas and Kentucky Democratic primaries. Cardona, speaking during the 10 a.m. hour of Wednesday’s Newsroom, argued that “Arkansas and Kentucky have never been hotbeds of the Democratic Party.”

President Obama only picked up 58 percent of the vote in the Kentucky Democratic primary, and 60 percent in Arkansas. “Look, Arkansas and Kentucky have never been hotbeds of the Democratic Party. There’s no real infrastructure there. There’s no organization by the Obama campaign there,” Cardona insisted.

Cardona’s first statement ignores some quite recent history, that former President Bill Clinton was the Democratic governor of Arkansas before he ran for president – and that both Arkansas and Kentucky voted for him in the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections.

As far as infrastructure goes, both states might be far from solid red as they have had Democratic governors since 2007. Arkansas had two Democratic senators as late as 2011 when former Senator Blanche Lincoln finished out her second term after replacing another Democrat, Senator Dale Bumpers. Meanwhile, Arkansas Democratic Senator Mark Pryor is still serving his second term in the U.S. Senate.

Both states have a Democratic history as well. Since 1950, 11 different Democrats served in Arkansas as governor or acting governor, compared to just three Republican governors. Kentucky has seen 13 Democratic governors since 1950, and only two Republican governors.

Both Kentucky and Arkansas voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976, and Arkansas voted Democratic in every presidential election year from 1920 through 1964. Kentucky, meanwhile, voted Democratic every presidential election from 1932 through 1952, and went for Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.

Cardona’s spin is right up there with Obama’s own, when he ludicrously claimed a year ago that “Texas has always been a pretty Republican state, for, you know, historic reasons.” That would be news to the aforementioned Lyndon Johnson.

But as always with Obama’s palace guard, it has to be the voters — even if they’re Democrats just like the president and the journalists at the WaPo; the president’s faults are never his own, nor are they ever the fault of his ideology and his oikophobia.

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“In Memoriam: The Old Obama, Who Wanted to Bring People Together:”

The 2004 version of Barack Obama, who captured the nation with a dazzling speech about unity and went on to win the presidency on a message of hope, died on Monday. He was 8 years old.

The cause of death appeared to be a bitter realization that he needed to win reelection in an increasingly partisan political environment, a cancer that he had been battling for months if not years.

Obama’s illness got the best of him late Monday, as he announced that his campaign for four more years in the White House would be based not on optimism, but rather the shady corporate record of his opponent, Mitt Romney, who ran a private-equity firm that few Americans knew about before this year.

Obama’s announcement was a stark contrast to the speech that catapulted him into his party’s sights eight years ago, when he electrified Democrats at their quadrennial convention.

“There is not a liberal America and a conservative America,” Obama declared to cheers at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. “There is the United States of America.

“We are one people,” Obama roared, perhaps envisioning his political future as the crowd rose to its feet. “All of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.”

And strangely enough, it was in that very speech that Obama predicted his own demise. Just before his climactic applause line, the future president issued a stark warning.

“Even as we speak,” he said, “there are those who are preparing to divide us — the spin masters, the negative ad peddlers, who embrace the politics of anything goes.”

In other words, typical hack Cook County politicians, one of whom managed to temporarily persuade the suckers in the networks who should know better:

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Madeleine Morgenstern of The Blaze has the backstory to get you up to speed if you’re arriving at this story cold; then click over to Michelle Malkin, who writes:

Back in 2008, I wrote a column called “The Four Stages of Conservative Female Abuse.” It’s a handy guide to the common types of attacks waged against unapologetic conservative women in the public square. You can read my related war on conservative posts here.

The vile exploitation of S.E. Cupp’s image by Hustler magazine — see Twitchy for background/reaction and The Blaze for the original story– falls under category 2 and 4.

Let’s review:

Read the whole thing. Of course, it’s not as though both genders aren’t dehumanized by the left when it’s time to attack, as Ed Morrissey writes at Hot Air.

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At the start of 2009, I warned “Uh Oh — I Smell Yet Another Pathetic Gatsby Remake.” Sadly, I may have been all too prescient:

As Tom Shillue wrote at the time at Big Hollywood:

According to this story in the Guardian, Hollywood is geared up and ready for the recession, and it seems they are eager to entertain us with a series of big-budget “I told you so’s”.

Baz Luhrmann is all set to mount a re-make of The Great Gatsby because, according to him, “People will need an explanation of where we are and where we’ve been, and The Great Gatsby can provide that explanation.”

Oh, boy. Here we go again. Do I really need another lesson in why the American dream is a charade, and our materialism leads to emptiness and despair? I’ve heard this all before.

The time it takes to complete a film can do strange things to its message. What might have seemed like a warning about economic excess at the start of the Obama administration can now be viewed by many as a cautionary tale about the identikit persona of Mr. Obama himself, and a reminder of the blindness of those who eagerly followed him. Regarding the former, Mark Steyn wrote in his latest column:

“I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time, even then,” says Nick Carraway in “The Great Gatsby.” “His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people – his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself… . So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.”

In a post-modern America, the things that Gatsby attempted to fake – an elite schooling – Obama actually had; the things that Gatsby attempted to obscure – the impoverished roots – merely add to Obama’s luster. Gatsby claimed to have gone to Oxford, but nobody knew him there because he never went; Obama had a million bucks’ worth of elite education at Occidental, Columbia and Harvard Law, and still nobody knew him (“Fox News contacted some 400 of his classmates and found no one who remembered him”). In that sense, Obama out-Gatsbys Gatsby: His “shiftless and unsuccessful” relatives – the deportation-dodging aunt on public housing in Boston, the DWI undocumented uncle, the $12-a-year brother back in Nairobi – are useful props in his story, the ever more vivid bit-players as the central character swims ever more out of focus, but they don’t seem to know him either. The more autobiographies he writes, the less anybody knows.

Like Gatsby presiding over his wild, lavish parties, Obama is aloof and remote: let everyone else rave deliriously; he just has to be. He is, in his way, the apotheosis of the Age of American Incredibility. When just being who you are anyway is an incredible accomplishment, Obama managed to run and win on biography almost entirely unmoored from life. But then, like Gatsby, he knew a thing or two about “the unreality of reality.”

To borrow from one of Gatsby’s most famous scenes, the shirts have no emperor. Though one huge difference: attendance at Gatsby’s wild parties was entirely voluntary. We’re all trapped in Obama’s cocktail party until at least November. And whatever happens then, we’ll be working off the hangover for quite some time to come.

But back to the film itself. My first thought while watching the above trailer was, to paraphrase the perceptive veteran film critics Beavis and Butt-head, this really sucks — but it sucks in unique ways we’ve never seen before. Or actually, we have; the same problems that plague Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator — killer production design, great wardrobe, phony looking CGI, and the same unbelievable lead are at work here as well. Here’s what I wrote in 2005:

Over the summer, I finally caught The Aviator. Wonderful 1930s and ’40s production design, but its casting reminded me why I skipped it on the big screen in the first place. There was simply no way I could buy the babyfaced perpetual child-man Leonardo DiCaprio as business tycoon Howard Hughes. He simply lacked the gravitas to play the character, despite the fact that at 30, DiCaprio is only a few years younger than Hughes himself was at the start of the era depicted in Scorsese’s picture.

(Incidentally, could you imagine DiCaprio as the title character in Citizen Kane? And yet Orson Welles was actually four years younger than DiCaprio when he played Charles Foster Kane.)

It isn’t entirely DiCaprio’s fault; just about every Hollywood period movie made post-Brat Pack suffers from the same problem. (For example, the Dorthy Parker film from 1994 with Jennifer Jason Leigh in the title role, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, comes immediately to mind. At least in Titanic, DiCaprio and Kate Winslet were supposed to be callow youths, and were surrounded by an army of veteran character actors.)

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The Washington Post regrets to inform its readers that the presidential candidate it was deep in the tank for in 2008 may be in trouble this time around:

[I]t is a rearview-mirror assessment that could hurt Obama’s chances for a second term. One key indicator has hardly budged this year: Asked where they stand financially compared with when Obama took office in January 2009, 30 percent say they are worse off, and only 16 percent say they are better off. There is not a widespread sense that things would be better had Romney been president for the past three-plus years, but for the incumbent it is a critical measure. On this question, Obama’s numbers continue to resemble those of George H.W. Bush, who lost his bid for reelection in 1992 amid a flagging economy.

At the moment, his campaign is giving off a similar tone as well, isn’t it? Meanwhile, Bush #43-era Secretary of State Colin Powell is having second thoughts about supporting Obama again as he did in 2008, leading Glenn Reynolds to write, “You don’t need a weatherman to see which way the wind is blowing: Not when you can watch a weathervane like Colin Powell, anyway.”

Oh, and let us recall “Obama’s Bush #41 Scanner Moment,” from April of last year:

“If he were a Republican, this would be his ‘Bush (41) meets a grocery scanner moment.’ But he’s not, so it is quietly buried.”

– A commenter at Ann Althouse’s blog responding to Obama’s punitive tone yesterday in the latter half of the above video, when confronted with questions over his Carteresque gas policy, found via Glenn Reynolds. Yes, I know (as does Snopes) that the first President Bush wasn’t surprised by a supermarket scanner — as the former head of the CIA, and a man who these days routinely skydives in his 80s, one would assume he’s well acquainted with technology.

* * * * *

But at the Tatler, Bryan Preston has a nifty suggestion to drive its viewership much higher:

Note to the RNC: Download this video and mash it up with the Obama “under my plan energy prices will necessarily skyrocket” clip. Together they prove that this president cares much more about social engineering than about the economy or how his own policies are hurting Americans every single day. This video is President Obama’s Marie Antoinette moment: He tells a man who complains about high gas prices to buy a new car. Think about that for a second. The man is worried that gas prices are eating him alive. Obama’s response is to needle him to spend more money. That’s the response of an elitist jerk, not a leader who understands or even cares about the damage his policies are doing to the country. If that’s not indicative of this president’s arrogant and out-of-touch mindset, I don’t know what is. Hat tip to InstaPundit, who also has a screen shot of the AP story about this remarks, a story that AP eventually scrubbed to remove the remarks. So there’s a story about media bias in the mix as well.

In 2008, the media were happy to let Obama walk on water, to borrow a line from then-Newsweek editor Jon Meacham. But back then, all of anger from Obama, the MSM and the left could be channeled into a single direction: BUSH SUX.

In 2012, Obama will have to defend his own record as president — a challenge made all the more difficult by having to live up to the canonization the media performed on him before he took office. Can he win? Sure. But it’s going to be a much uglier process no matter what happens. And as with yesterday, we’re going to see many more examples highlighting that his bitter clingers rhetoric in 2008 was no accident — he really is that contemptuous of the people he’s deigned to govern.

Similarly, while all of Obama’s promises come with expiration dates (sort of like the key moments in his life story), Obama has his own “read my lips” moment to live down, a la GHWB:

Steve Green has had lots of fun with this pledge over the past three years. Or to put it another way — “Pay up, suckers.”

(WaPo article found via Orrin Judd, who adds, “And it didn’t matter for GHWB that the economy was improving” in ’92.)

Related: And then there are all of the down-ticket races in November.

More:  “Uhhh….Uhhh…Uhhhh….Uhhhh…”

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Now is the time when we juxtapose, Small Dead Animals-style:

Today is a red-letter day for the New York Times. For the first time, the paper has reported in its news section that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright once uttered the phrase “God damn America.” Wright’s comments were widely reported and widely discussed beginning with an ABC News report six months ago. Barack Obama even had to give a much-publicized speech because of those words, and others. But the newspaper of record has never seen fit to publish Wright’s quote in its news pages. Until today.

– Byron York, National Review Online, September 24th, 2008.

“NYT Reporter Goes To Romney’s Church, Seeks Dirt From Worshipers.”

– Headine at Big Journalism, yesterday.

No word yet if she actually has the right church — you never know when it comes to the New York Times and a politician’s religious affiliation — or if Romney’s fellow churchgoers discussed this previous editorial comment regarding Mr. Romney’s faith from a fellow Timesperson:

Speaking of Blow, his is a cautionary tale (in more ways than one) reminding us that at the Gray Lady, the liberal cocoon works both ways — keeping the papers’ readers — and its journalists — blind to the larger world around them.

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Shorter Cory Booker on Sunday: Team Obama’s attacks on Romney and Bain are ‘crap.’

Shorter Cory Booker on Monday: Barack Obama is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.

Shorter Obama administration flack: No, we did not have conversational relations with that man, Cory Booker.

Shorter Obama administration supporters on Twitter: Go #&#@&@* yourself, Cory!

Related: “Ten ways you know the Bain attack is bombing.”

More: “Guess who got the most private-equity money in 2008?“

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During the election year of 2004, the New York Times attempted to help get John Kerry over the finish line by excusing Dan Rather’s hit job on George Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard as “fake but accurate,” and a classic Orwellian meme was born. The Hill’s Bernie Quigley is eager to do similar damage control for Elizabeth “1/32nd American Indian” Warren:

The first poetic vision of Europeans in the new world was that of James Fenimore Cooper, who conjured Natty Bumpo. He had an “Indian name” — he had several: Hawkeye, Deerslayer, Pathfinder — indicating that he had been “reborn” in the new world in the Indian spirit. It is the oldest and most important myth in the American canon of our folklore, from Lone Ranger, who died and became “born again” via agency of an Indian shaman, and Fox Mulder, who returned from the dead via Indian intercession in “The X Files,” born anew with the past burned away in death, to enter a new age under the flag of the White Buffalo.

So Warren’s claim to be “part Indian” is correct in mythical terms. Every old-school white Oklahoman is in this regard even if this is nominally not true.

As highlighted by Ace of Spades (read the whole thing, he’s having lots of fun here), who quips in response:

It’s not a lie for me to want to be George Clooney. But if I begin writing checks signed “George Clooney,” I’m pretty sure we’ve exited the realm of the “mythic imagination.”

Elizabeth Warren was noted as a “minority woman of color” at Harvard.

She displaced a minority woman of color — one whose status as a minority woman of color was more than “mythic” or “poetical.”

OK, back to Quigley for more “nominally not true”-style riffing:

So Warren’s claim to be “part Indian” is correct in mythical terms. Every old-school white Oklahoman is in this regard even if this in nominally not true. But it is not a lie to want to be Indian and to imagine your ancestors were. It is to be free of Europeanism. Emerson saw the laggard Europeanism within the Yankee mind as a curse of the unformed American, living half in shadow. It would bring temptation unnatural to us raised free in the forest; fascism, as in Italy, Spain and German, and the perennial virus of French nihilism.

“This just in,” Ace jokes. “Warrior-dominated tribal bands are free of the evils of power by militaristic rule.”

Beyond that, the allusion to Emerson is pretty rich, considering that last fall, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison wrote a book titled American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas, which spotlighted Emerson as the one American inspiration of Nietzsche, who in turn was one of the inspirations for fascism, as in Germany, and the perennial virus of nihilism in general.

As Ratner-Rosenhagen wrote:

Nietzsche admired the ease with which Emerson made philosophy an ally of, rather than a retreat from or a corrective to, one’s own experiences and longings. He referred to him as “the excellent [treffliche] Emerson,” largely because he had shown Nietzsche how one can make philosophy “friends with life.” “Nietzsche loved Emerson,” observes Harold Bloom, who regards Nietzsche’s characterization of Emerson “the best comment, that I know, upon the American sage.”

None of the movements that Quigley quotes above were too keen on free market capitalism, and promoted violence in the street when it suited their goals — and funny enough, Warren is OK with those concepts as well. After all, as she said last fall, “I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do. I support what they do.”

To be fair, they are “mostly peaceful” — just ask the media. Speaking of fake but accurate, and/or nominally not true.

Related: At Ricochet, a photo essay: “Pretendians: Why is it So Cool to be an Indian?”

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Great observation from Jonathan S. Tobin at Commentary, which I was going to link to as an update to the previous item on Kurtz and Cronkite, but it’s worth spotlighting in a new post:

An essential element of the mainstream media’s myth about its own impartiality is the notion that before Fox News came along we were living in a golden age of broadcast news reporting. The days when national news was the dominion of three networks and a few major newspapers is portrayed as Eden before the fall, an era when partisanship of the kind that is now both familiar and expected was unknown. A key element to this fairy tale is the idea that the journalistic icons of the time, like CBS’s Walter Cronkite, were Olympian figures who would never stoop to play favorites or inject ideology into the news.

But this view is totally false. As media news analyst Howard Kurtz writes in the Daily Beast, a new biography of Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley spills the beans on the godlike anchorman’s unethical practices, including blatant partisanship that would make the conservative talkers on Fox and the liberals on MSNBC blush. While Kurtz still admires Cronkite in spite of his flaws, the problem here is not just that god had feet of clay after all. It’s that the truth about Cronkite throws the entire narrative of the liberal mainstream media under the bus. It wasn’t Fox that poisoned the well of journalism, as former New York Times editor Bill Keller recently alleged. Fox and other such outlets were brought into existence in an effort to balance a journalistic establishment that was already tilting heavily to the left. The real sin here is not bias or even partisanship but the pretense of fairness that Cronkite exemplified.

To confront the unvarnished truth about Cronkite is not to entirely discount his value as a television performer. There was much to admire about his news sense, and his on screen persona was a commanding and trusted presence that everyone who appears on television aspires to emulate. But the beloved Cronkite who generations of Americans grew up watching was only part of the picture. What Americans didn’t know about Cronkite gives the lie to the notion that the pre-Fox era was one in which non-partisan fairness ruled the airwaves.

Which was a function of two converging trends — for the first, allow me to quote from a big chunk of my “Atlas Mugged” article from 2007 on the birth of the Blogosphere, specifically, the segment where I wrote on the Blogosphere’s predecessor, the mass media of the 20th century. Beginning with the first commercial radio networks in the 1920s, there were a limited amount of frequencies assigned by the FCC. This hampered television as well after WWII. Add to that the cost of setting up a coast-to-coast TV network in the days before cable TV, printing newspapers and magazines, or setting up a newspaper syndicate such as AP, UPI, and Reuters, and it meant that by the early-1950s, the American public was being served up a surprisingly small amount of news and information. (It’s the Alvy Singer formula applied to the mid-century legacy media — the food here is terrible. Yes, and such small portions):

Prior to the 1920s, American newspapers and pamphleteers had a long, diverse history of vigorous, partisan debate. Which is why there are still newspapers with names like the Springfield Democrat and Shelbyville Republican.
That began to change with the rise of competition from the broadcast media. In the 1920s, because radio frequencies were finite, their allocation became heavily regulated by the federal government. As Shannon Love of the classically liberal Chicago Boyz economics blog explains, the federal government “took the radio spectrum, and instead of auctioning it off like land, essentially socialized it. And then they made the distribution of the broadcast spectrum basically a political decision.”

That, combined later with the FCC’s so-called “Fairness Doctrine—which required broadcasting networks to give “equal time” to opposing viewpoints—compelled broadcasters to maintain at least a veneer of impartiality in order to get and keep their licenses. A de facto political compromise was reached, Love says, “that the broadcast news would not be political—it would be objective and nonpartisan, was basically the idea. And then that carried over from radio to TV,” and eventually to print media. (That conceit continues to this day, as the media toss around words like “unbiased” and “objective” as easily as Dan Rather tosses off hoary, made-up Texas-isms.)

Completely dependent on the federal government, the broadcast industry’s most urgent priority became “don’t rock the boat.” And aping their broadcast competitors, newspapers began to adopt the mantle of impartiality, as well. A mass media that increasingly eschewed vibrant political debate helped FDR win four presidential elections handily, and Ike’s refusal to dismantle the New Deal in the 1950s only perpetuated its soft socialism. That era’s pervasive desire for consensus was symbolized by the ubiquitous Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and his centrist politics.

By the early 1970s, mass media had reached its zenith (if you’ll pardon the pun). Most Americans were getting their news from one of three TV networks’ half-hour nightly broadcasts. With the exception of New York, most big cities had only one or two primary newspapers. And no matter what a modern newspaper’s lineage, by and large its articles, except for local issues, came from global wire services like the Associated Press or Reuters; it took its editorial lead from the New York Times; and it claimed to be impartial (while usually failing miserably).

Up until the Reagan years, Love says, “definitely fewer than one hundred people, and maybe as few as twenty people, actually decided what constituted national news in the United States.” These individuals were principally concentrated within a few square blocks of midtown Manhattan, the middle of which was home to the offices of the New York Times. The aptly nicknamed “Gray Lady” largely shaped the editorial agendas not just of newspapers but of television, as well. As veteran TV news correspondent Bernard Goldberg wrote in his 2003 book Arrogance, “If the New York Times went on strike tomorrow morning, they’d have to cancel the CBS, NBC, and ABC evening newscasts tomorrow night.”

Love calls this “the Parliament of Clocks”: creating the illusion of truth or accuracy by force of consensus. “Really, the only way that consumers can tell that they’re getting accurate information is to check another media source,” Love says. “And unfortunately, that creates an incentive for the media sources to all agree on the same story.”

The second issue is a topic that Jonah Goldberg deconstructs thoroughly in The Tyranny of Cliches — liberals love to believe that they have no ideology, unlike us folks in what Hillary once dubbed the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. How that mindset works for those in the MSM specifically, was a topic that Ace of Spades explored in depth in 2010, shortly before Newsweek was dumped by the Washington Post for a buck to the Harmans (who in turned hired Tina Brown to edit; Howard Kurtz would begin to work for her later that year):

Choosing to be a communist is Decision. And, similarly, choosing to be a conservative is a Decision. Choosing to be a strident, partisan liberal ideologue is also a decision (but an easier one, too, because it’s only a few degrees removed from soft-liberal feel-goodery).

But choosing to be a soft-liberal and mouth empty platitudes? Easy as pie, and not one in 20 people is going to bother challenging you on those platitudes.

Saying anything else just might get you into an argument. Now, some people like arguments (us lot, for example) but most do not. Most people are adverse to confrontation and react emotionally, not intellectually, to disagreement.

Plus, if you don’t really know much at all about politics, such arguments will almost certainly result in that fact being exposed, and then you’ll look uninformed and stupid — and who the hell wants that? No one, that’s who.

So, all else being equal, it makes perfect sense for the 15-20% of our population that barely knows anything at all to politics to stick to the safe harbor of the default script.

This is the MFM’s greatest achievement — that for this 15-20% of the population that has no serious, structure political beliefs at all, an adherence to the general basics of liberalism is the default setting. All ties go to the liberals, in other words, and that’s big thing, isn’t it?

And that’s why we’re so outraged at the MFM. This isn’t just about their smug arrogance or corrupt pretense of being the fair-and-objective Deciders. It’s a personal thing — our personal revulsion at a set of know-nothing inexpert, unprofessional clowns arrogating to themselves the power to decide what is and is not permitted in polite, enlightened discourse — but it’s not just personal.

This has enormous implications for the trajectory of our politics — if the MFM can establish that soft-liberalism is the cost-free, work-free, choice-free, information-free path of least resistance for such a big chunk of our population, the MFM basically gets to choose the nation’s path.

Which… they largely have, of course. And that is why I fluctuate between treating the Democratic Party and the MFM as our top opponents in politics. Yes, it’s the Democratic Party on the ballot every two years.

But, as Andrew Breitbart rages in his stump speech, it’s actually the MFM which props the Democratic Party up by delivering unto them 15-20% of the public they never had to convince or fight for. 15-20% of the vote is delivered to the liberal camp every election simply because the media has established that’s the way nice people who just want what’s good — and want the least hassle over politics — vote.

And I think a fair number of partisan liberals understand this (far more than would be willing to admit it) and that accounts for their rage at FoxNews and Rush Limbaugh and any other contrary voice. If the Democrats’ advantage among soft-liberal apathetics declined to 15-20% to 10% or 5% or (God Forbid!) no advantage at all, they could start seriously losing elections.

Partially as a result of Fox going in a different direction beginning in the mid-1990s, and partially as a result of Democrats in general moving far to the left of where they professed to stand during the Clinton years, the center of gravity has shifted in the MSM much further left than the days when it attempted to hide behind a bland centrism. There are even some in the MSM who will profess their industry’s bias, if you catch them at the right moment. (As Cronkite himself did, back in 2003, as the then-ombudspersons of the Times and the WaPo did in 2004 and 2008.) But just as with much of the left thinking it has no ideology, and that they were straight shooters during the Cronkite-era*, despite reveling in the fall of first LBJ, then RMN, this is one media myth, to borrow from the name of journalist/author Joseph Campbell’s blog, that will take some time to extinguish itself.

* Just watch Network, Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 satire of the TV industry, or read Victor Lasky’s It Didn’t Start With Watergate, published around the same period, to get a sense of how fair and centrist they were back then…

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At the Daily Beastweek, Howard Kurtz has a hit and miss review of Douglas Brinkley’s new biography, Cronkite. Kurtz writes that Walter Cronkite’s liberal bias was visible on the air as early as the day of the Kennedy assassination. He adds that it would only get worse as the years progressed and Cronkite’s power increased, during the monolithic era of the Big Three TV networks:

But he was far more liberal than the public believed, and he let it show in unacceptable ways. Had Cronkite pulled such stunts today, I would probably be among those calling for him to step down.

Barry Goldwater distrusted him from the start, and with good reason. On the day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Cronkite nodded his head in thinly veiled contempt when handed a note on air that the Arizona senator had said “no comment.” Goldwater was attending his mother-in-law’s funeral that day.

“Whether or not Senator Goldwater wins the nomination,” Cronkite told viewers another day, “he is going places, the first place being Germany.” Although Goldwater had merely accepted an invitation to visit a U.S. Army facility there, correspondent Daniel Schorr said he was launching his campaign in “the center of Germany’s right wing.” During Goldwater’s speech at the 1964 convention, some conservatives fed up with the networks gave Cronkite the finger.

Four years later, after Cronkite had belatedly turned against LBJ’s Vietnam War, he met privately with Robert Kennedy. “You must announce your intention to run against Johnson, to show people there will be a way out of this terrible war,” he said in Kennedy’s Senate office. Soon afterward, Cronkite got an exclusive interview in which Kennedy left the door open for a possible run—the very candidacy that the anchor had urged him to undertake. (Kennedy announced three days later.) I am shaking my head at the spectacle of a network anchor secretly urging a politician to mount a White House campaign—and then interviewing him about that very question. This was duplicitous, a major breach of trust.

Gosh, imagine the US media being that deeply in the tank for a Democratic presidential candidate in 2008, to the point where they dubbed themselves his “non-official campaign,” and yet still attempted to maintain a thin veneer of “objectivity” — at least until the election was over, and they really dropped the mask, at least for a time.

More from Kurtz on Cronkite:

As everyone from presidents to astronauts catered to him, Cronkite used that access to drive unflinching coverage of civil rights, corruption, and especially the morass of Vietnam—when his own reporting led him to declare that ill-fated conflict a stalemate. When LBJ said that “if I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the country,” he was acknowledging that a single newsman had the power to change a national narrative.

Except that Johnson likely never said such a thing, as Joseph Campbell, the author of the 2010 book, Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism points out today on his Media Myth Alert Website, in response to Kurtz:

The power of that broadcast stems from the immediate and visceral effect the anchorman’s critique supposedly had on the president.

It is, though, exceedingly unlikely that Johnson had any reaction of the sort. After all, as I discuss in Getting It Wrong, the president wasn’t in front of a television set that night.

He was on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, attending the 51st birthday party of Governor John Connally.

About the time the anchorman intoned his “mired in stalemate” comment, Johnson wasn’t lamenting any loss of support from Cronkite. Johnson was making light of Connally’s age, saying:

“Today you are 51, John. That is the magic number that every man of politics prays for — a simple majority.”

So it’s difficult to fathom how Johnson could have had much moved by a television program he didn’t see. Or ever discussed with Cronkite.

Here’s Kurtz on Cronkite’s final years, leading up to the incident that cost his successor his job, and inadvertently led to the original name for our parent company:

Cronkite came to regret handing the anchor reins to Dan Rather in 1981. “Rather and company shut me out from doing anything,” he complained. I remember listening to him rail against Rather in his Upper East Side apartment, his anger still palpable after so many years.

On the day that CBS chairman Les Moonves fired several people over Rather’s botched story on George W. Bush and the National Guard—having already deposed Rather as anchor—Cronkite barged into Moonves’s office and congratulated him on doing the right thing. Moonves was able to sleep that night, he recalled, because “Walter said it was OK.”

Yes, because by 2004, Cronkite’s judgement as an elder statesman, both as a proponent of “one-world government” and as a man with his pulse on America’s foreign affairs was so infallible:

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Pop quiz by Walter Russell Mead, who asks:

“American Presidents have long been criticized for being too in thrall to the Jewish lobby. The American Jews influence US foreign policy and that explains Washington’s unwavering support for Israel.”

Who made this statement this past week?

(a) A disgruntled fringe neo-Nazi
(b) Some poor soul ranting on their Facebook page
(c) The BBC

Sadly, as you can see in the clip above, the answer is C. This ugly assertion is the host’s opening line in an episode of this past week’s BBC HARDtalk program. This vicious garbage isn’t “sort of” or “almost” anti-Semitic; it is the real thing: vivid, unapologetic, odious and wrong.

Mead hopes that the BBC presenter is “just reading a script that some fool of a writer threw up on the teleprompter” — but in any case, veering into Protocols of Elders of Zion territory is a reminder of hard left bias and “powerfully corrosive internal culture,” as a former BBC journalist described it to me in 2007, which has seeped into the network over the past 15 years or so. Mead writes that his blog “spends quite a bit of time calling attention to the ominous rise of anti-Semitism around the world:”

It isn’t because we think that anti-Semitism is the only form of hate and bigotry in the world, or that we think that it is more important to fight prejudice against Jews than prejudice against other people. But anti-Semitism, besides being on the ascent at times when many other forms of hatred are mostly on the back foot, is particularly dangerous, and not just because of what anti-Semitism can do and has done to the Jews.

The rise of anti-Semitism is a sign of widespread social and cultural failure. It is a leading indicator of a loss of faith in liberal values and of a diminished capacity to understand the modern world and to thrive in it. Societies that tolerate anti-Semitism take a fateful step toward the loss of both freedom and prosperity. People who think “the Jews” run the banks lose the ability to understand, much less to operate financial systems. People who think “the Jews” dominate business through hidden structures can’t build or long maintain a successful modern economy. People who think “the Jews” dominate politics lose their ability to interpret political events, to diagnose social evils and to organize effectively for positive change. People who think “the Jews” run the media and control the news lose the ability to grasp what is happening around them. And people who think “the Jews” control America’s Middle Eastern policy lose the ability to understand, much less to influence, American policy in this vital part of the world. Emancipation from anti-Semitism is thus one of the necessary steps that many individuals and cultures have to take before they are able to act effectively and participate meaningfully in contemporary life.

Jew hatred isn’t more stupid or more wicked than other forms of racial and religious hatred. The anti-black bigot is as delusional as the Jew hater; hatred and prejudice of all kinds corrode the intelligence and degrade the spirit of everyone who suffers from them. But Jew hatred is more disempowering and self-defeating than most other kinds of hate because it involves not only negative emotions about a group of people but a deeply false set of ideas about how the world works.

Read the whole thing. And then click over to National Review Online, where John Fund and Boris Johnson, London’s newly reelected conservative mayor (besting “Red Ken” Livingstone) have a couple of solutions to the bias of the BBC. Ultimately, Fund believes the best answer is to starve the beast:

Critics such as Mayor Johnson beg to differ. “I sometimes felt that my chief opponent was the local BBC News,” Johnson says of the reelection campaign he just fought. “The prevailing view of Beeb newsrooms is, with honourable exceptions, statist, corporatist, defeatist, anti-business, [and] Europhile.” He finds it curious that BBC London ignores the 75 percent of London’s economy that is driven by the private sector.

The way to fight this, Johnson claims, is to appoint a Conservative-party supporter to replace Thompson as director general — “and no mucking around.” The new BBC head must be someone who is “free-market [and] pro-business and [who] understands the depths of the problems this country faces,” he insists. “If we can’t change the Beeb, we can’t change the country.”

I understand his frustration, but I worry about his methods. Of course the BBC is biased, but appointing someone to run it based on their political allegiance smacks of how the heads of French, German, Italian, and Austrian television are now chosen. The jobs have tended to go to hacks, and the programming has been unimaginative at best. Putting in a Tory is also unlikely to lead to permanent reforms. As Anne McEvoy of the London Evening Standard has noted, “Follow Boris’s disastrous recipe and when the government eventually changes, the cry would surely be to turf out the chief broadcaster and put in a political clone of the other party.”

There is a better way. Vladimir Bukovsky, the former Soviet dissident who spent a decade in the Gulag before being released in 1976, has fought a long-running battle with the BBC since he settled in Britain. Although it once spoke for the entire nation and had high standards, it now “unfairly competes with private channels and has sunk to juvenile levels in much of its programming,” Bukovsky has observed.

So he has joined the estimated 5 percent of Britons who simply refuse to pay the annual BBC license fee. He is not surprised that he and most other refuseniks haven’t been pursued. “I wanted people to see images of me being handcuffed and dragged into court,” he wistfully told the London Times in 2008. “But instead, the BBC retreated quietly.”

That seems in contradistinction to the BBC’s advertising on this topic — recall this creepy Orwellian ad the BBC produced four or five years ago to gin up its license fee renewals:

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In a lengthy article in the New York Post, Kyle Smith compares the intertwined fiscal, demographic and anti-business woes of Greece and California. After the handshakes and initial pleasantries are out of the way, Smith reminds the Golden State and the birthplace of western democracy, “The two of you should have a lot to chat about. Such as what to do when you’re in a burning building with no exits:”

In the absence of clear authority, conditions would be ripe for a strongman to take over Greece. Strongmen tend not to be very nice. A majority of police officers, according to a survey published in the Athens paper The Tribune, voted this month for the neo-Nazi group Golden Dawn.

Lee Harris, writing for the American Enterprise Institute, brings up a crucial point about Greece: In the US, “No one seriously argues that the period of austerity (i.e., recession) was the deliberate policy of this or that administration. But the European austerity programs are the deliberate policy of the governments that have imposed them, and this is a fact that every citizen forced to tighten his belt is perfectly aware of.”

Greeks aren’t going to be waiting patiently in breadlines singing “Brother, Can You Spare a Drachma.” We’re talking about serious rage. Greece may be the cradle of democracy, but its current democracy is only 37 years old. Before that: military rule.

These sound like just the kind of conditions you probably don’t want if your best hope of climbing out of recession is to attract tourists.

Nationalism, which the EU was supposed to cure forever as all member nations joined hands and sang hosannas to Delors, is rising again like heartburn: A left-wing Greek member of parliament declared, “Achtung Frau Merkel. The Greek people want to live free and they don’t want to be under a new occupation from Germany.” A left-wing extremist group torched a car belonging to a German who leads an EU task force on Greece. In relatively unscathed France, extremist parties captured 30% of the vote in this spring’s presidential elections.

ATHENS? I’d like you to meet Sacramento. The two of you should have a lot to chat about. Such as what to do when you’re in a burning building with no exits.

In California, efforts to close the budget deficit by taxing the rich resulted in the deficit shrinking from $9 billion all the way to $16 billion. Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposed solution: Tax the rich even more (and tax everybody else, too, by hiking sales tax).

California contains about one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients (despite having 12% of the nation’s population) and is planning a high-speed rail system that will cost an estimated $68 billion, including $4 billion on a section The Los Angeles Times dubbed a “train to nowhere.” Its pension costs for public employees, 85% of them unionized, rose 2,000% in the first decade of this century, which is 1,976% more than revenues increased. A CEO survey in April ruled that California was the least business-friendly state in the US.

In 1999, when the state was flooded with dotcom tax revenue, it set in place a law, SB 400, that assumed the good times would continue forever and allowed government workers as young as 50 to retire on 90% of salary they earned in their final year, when they would ramp up the overtime. In order to cover these commitments through the CALPERS investment fund, the Dow Jones Industrial Average would have to be over 25,000 by now.

Pension and health-care spending for retirees are set to triple this decade. More than 12,000 state and local workers are collecting more than $100,000 a year in pensions. Even convicted felons can collect pensions.

Greek and Californian politicians made the same mistake: They wanted union backing so badly that they promised far more than they could ever deliver. They knew that they’d be long gone before the crisis kicked in, or maybe it would solve itself. Either way, they didn’t care. They were happy to use tomorrow’s seed corn to buy themselves power. California’s pension plans face a $500 billion hole in unfunded promises.

And speaking of California’s unions, at City Journal, Troy Senik invites us to observe (fortunately, at a distance far enough back so as to not to worry about the fists and brickbats), “The Worst Union in America — How the California Teachers Association betrayed the schools and crippled the state.” Senik describes the California Teachers Association as “the single most powerful special interest in California,” whose end product brings to mind Woody Allen’s classic Catskills-era riff at the beginning of Annie Hall – “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.” “Yes I know — and such small portions.”

Related: Thomas Sowell predicts a Greece/California-style destiny for the rest of America:

Now that census data show — for the first time in American history — that the number of white babies born is exceeded by the number of babies born to non-white minorities, the question is: What does this mean for the future of American society?

Politically, it means that minorities who traditionally vote overwhelmingly for Democrats can ensure that the country veers ever further to the left over the years, making America more like the welfare states of Europe, whose unsustainable spending led ultimately to financial crises and widespread riots.

But this is not strictly a matter of whites versus non-whites. Jews vote consistently, and almost as overwhelmingly, for Democrats as blacks do. Moreover, Asian Americans are by no means as likely as other non-whites to vote for the class-warfare, tax-and-spend agenda of the Democrats.

Yet when all is said and done, the future political direction of the country seems painfully clear from these demographic trends, unless something happens to change the current correlation between race and political-party affiliation. Moreover, even that may not be enough.

Well, that’s something to look forward to.

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Now is the time when we juxtapose, Small Dead Animals-style:

“Fatherland” was first conceived as a nonfiction book, this time about the Europe that Hitler dreamed of creating.

But a summer vacation in Sicily in 1987 changed his plan. “There were a lot of German tourists on the beach,” he said, “and if you closed your eyes, you could just imagine you were in the victorious German empire. Suddenly, everything came to me as a novel, the idea of a cover-up, a sequence of deaths, someone investigating them. I went splashing into the water, and by the time I came back onto the beach I had it written in my mind.”

– The New York Times’ 1995 profile of Robert Harris, the author of Fatherland, the Cold War-alternative history, and the WWII-era novel Enigma.

A fortnight or so ago – before setting off for Berlin on my quadriga-spotting tour – I heard the Defence Secretary, Philip Hammond, on Radio 4 opine that what Europe really needed now was for Germany to, once again, take a proper responsibility for the continent’s security and vastly expand her armed forces, which, since 1945 have been a mere bundeswehr rump.

I nearly fell off my Brandenburg Gate of a chair: the whole point of the European project had been to bridle the bellicosity of her big powers – and in particular that proven troublemaker Germany – and that in this respect at least, the European Union represented one of the few examples in human history of the political classes of several nations acting selflessly and sensibly.

That these same politicians were afflicted by a strange sort of doublethink – both aspiring towards unity, and desperate for their own nationalistic electorates to preserve the substance of their sovereignties – was and is the peculiar vaulting horse upon which Europa’s crotch has now painfully descended.

For myself, I had always been an enthusiastic pro-European and an unashamed believer in a federal European state. Like many English people of my tastes and proclivities, I rather fancied myself propping up zinc bars, sipping pastis and listening to the musical chink-clank of petanque.

I viewed an increasingly united Europe as a necessary counterweight to US world hegemony and Russian idiocy, while also being a handy cosmopolitan stick with which to beat the backs of uptight Little Englanders.

But times and opinions change: the continent’s sixty year double-thinking reverie has turned the European dream into something of a nightmare: the quadriga’s remaining obstinately faced to the East has resulted in an unfeasible extension of the EU in that direction also, while the attempt to reconcile national sovereignty with a single European economy has resulted in a bloated bureaucracy full of the wind of its own democratic deficit.

– “The European Dream Has Become A Nightmare,” Will Self, the BBC, May 20th, 2012. As Orrin Judd writes in response, “Must be tough to admit that the Iron Lady understood things so much better than the left.”

At the Corner, Andrew Stuttaford has more on “Crumbling (Euro)land:”

In yet another article to be read with whisky and revolver loaded with a single bullet (for a slightly more cheery view try Roger Bootle here), the Daily Telegraph’s Jeremy Warner throws in his usual grim twist:

A bizarre money-go-round has developed, which works something like this. Fearing crippling property losses and a possible exit from the euro, the Spanish depositor removes his money from Spain and places it in an apparently “safe” German bank account. But unable to invest these inflows safely, the German bank places the money on deposit with the Bundesbank. Denied access to market funding, the Spanish bank taps the European Central Bank for the money instead, which in turn uses the excess liquidity building up at the Bundesbank. It’s unclear where the ultimate liability would lie in the event of default and/or exit from monetary union, but in all likelihood with the German taxpayer.

The German taxpayer, that is, who was never asked whether he wanted this nonsense currency in the first place.

For her part, Angela Merkel veers between steely prudence and the dream-language of grand schemes, the language of delusion and disaster:

In a speech this month, Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, spoke of the euro in utopian terms as not just a currency. Rather, she said, it is a “schicksalsgemeinshaft”, or “community of destiny” that Germans are committed to seeing through, almost whatever the costs.

Stalingrad will be taken.

Heh.™

Finally, at the London Telegraph, Janet Daley writes, “Europe finally awakes from its utopian dream.” Considering that various European utopian dreams been the cause of most of the world’s ills since 1914, I’m sure they’ll have another all set to go, once the fail on this latest utopian dream reaches even more epic proportions.

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The other night, I was watching a 1995-era History Channel show on the Nuremberg Trials — it was a classic case of clicking ’round the Roku box to see what was “new” at Netflix. I put “new” in quotation marks since so much of what’s available there in streaming format unfortunately consists of flotsam and jetsam I had either watched a decade or two ago, and/or shows I probably wouldn’t give the time of day to, except that the novelty of streaming video via the Internet still hasn’t worn off.

The History Channel show on the Nuremberg Trials mentioned in passing the Morgenthau Plan, a scheme for postwar Germany that was viciously punitive, if understandably so, and crafted by Henry Morgenthau, Jr., FDR’s  Treasury secretary, around 1944. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about it:

The Morgenthau Plan, proposed by United States Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., advocated that the Allied occupation of Germany following World War II include measures to eliminate Germany’s ability to wage war.

• In the original proposal this was to be achieved in three main steps.
• Germany was to be partitioned into two independent states.
• Germany’s main centers of mining and industry, including the Saar area, the Ruhr area and Upper Silesia were to be internationalized or annexed by neighboring nations.
• All heavy industry was to be dismantled or otherwise destroyed.

At the Second Quebec Conference on September 16, 1944, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Henry Morgenthau, Jr. persuaded the initially very reluctant British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to agree to the plan, likely using a $6 billion Lend Lease agreement to do so. Churchill chose however to narrow the scope of Morgenthau’s proposal by drafting a new version of the memorandum, which ended up being the version signed by the two statesmen.

The memorandum concluded “is looking forward to converting Germany into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character.”

As that Wikipedia page goes on to note, cooler heads eventually prevailed after the war. Otherwise, just as East Germany traded one totalitarian regime for another, West Germany would have traded the nightmare of Hitler’s scorched earth policy when he knew the war was lost for the Allies’ own scorched earth policy afterwards. Wikipedia quotes former president Herbert Hoover, who reminded advocates of the Morgenthau Plan in 1947 that “There is the illusion that the New Germany left after the annexations can be reduced to a ‘pastoral state’. It cannot be done unless we exterminate or move 25,000,000 people out of it.” West Germany would go on to become an industrial powerhouse, albeit one with a US military base located within it, just in case…

And while the Morgenthau Plan is now merely a footnote in history, ever since the late ’60s and early 1970s, the desire for punitive reprimitivization on a global scale has become all the rage amongst the wackier elements of the environmental left, including the fellow recently spotlighted by John Aziz at the Zero Hedge econo-blog, whom Aziz dubs “The Face of Genocidal Eco-Fascism”:

This is Finnish writer Pentti Linkola — a man who demands that the human population reduce its size to around 500 million and abandon modern technology and the pursuit of economic growth — in his own words.

He likens Earth today to an overflowing lifeboat:

What to do, when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and there is only one lifeboat? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship’s axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides.

He sees America as the root of the problem:

The United States symbolises the worst ideologies in the world: growth and freedom.

He unapologetically advocates bloodthirsty dictatorship:

Any dictatorship would be better than modern democracy. There cannot be so incompetent a dictator that he would show more stupidity than a majority of the people. The best dictatorship would be one where lots of heads would roll and where government would prevent any economical growth.

We will have to learn from the history of revolutionary movements — the national socialists, the Finnish Stalinists, from the many stages of the Russian revolution, from the methods of the Red Brigades — and forget our narcissistic selves.

A fundamental, devastating error is to set up a political system based on desire. Society and life have been organized on the basis of what an individual wants, not on what is good for him or her.

Dude.

Or to put it a bit more articulately, “The ecochondriacs mean it: This’d be a pretty nice planet if we didn’t live here,” Mark Steyn wrote a few years ago, a quote we referenced back in 2008 rounding up additional examples of what James Taranto dubbed a few years later, “Green Supremacism.”

Linking to the above post at Zero Hedge, Glenn Reynolds responded this past Friday:

As Bob Zubrin has pointed out, such sentiments, if usually a bit less bluntly stated, are driving environmental policy nowadays. It’s Himmler in a green shirt. These are not nice people who want good things for everyone. These are evil people who hanker after mass death.

Still, it’s educational to hear things like this: “The United States symbolises the worst ideologies in the world: growth and freedom.”

If you like growth and freedom, these people are your enemies. Remember that and treat them accordingly.

Responding to Linkola’s manifesto, John Aziz writes at Zero Hedge (and I urge you to read his whole post), “My suggestion for all such thinkers is that if they want to reduce the global population they should measure up to their words and go first.”

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