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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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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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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“Cops: Former CNN Executive Leaves Dog Feces In Neighbor’s Mailbox,” CBS Atlanta reports:

A former high-ranking CNN executive is accused of leaving dog feces in his neighbor’s mailbox.

Covington police say the victims of the incident, Benjamin Dameron and Ralph Miller, have video of Bob Furnad walking with his dog up to the mailbox and placing a bag filled with the feces in their mailbox.

“Mr. Furnad stated that he did place a bag containing dog feces in the victim’s mail box,” Covington Police Capt. Ken Malcom told WGCL-TV.

Which seems appropriate, as CNN has been depositing similar products in viewers’ homes for the past decade or two.

Though with much less luck in more recent years than Mr. Furnad, if the above report is true.

Related: “Piers Morgan, Feather Duster.”

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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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As spotted by RD Brewer, one of Ace of Spades’ co-bloggers, who reads the Politico and the New York Times, so you don’t have to. As Brewer writes, “Emmy winner Campbell Brown, former CNN host and former co-anchor at of NBC’s Weekend Today, rapped President Obama for being condescending toward women:”

WHEN I listen to President Obama speak to and about women, he sometimes sounds too paternalistic for my taste. In numerous appearances over the years — most recently at the Barnard graduation — he has made reference to how women are smarter than men. It’s all so tired, the kind of fake praise showered upon those one views as easy to impress. As I listen, I am always bracing for the old go-to cliché: “Behind every great man is a great woman.”

. . .

The women I know who are struggling in this economy couldn’t be further from the fictional character of Julia, presented in Mr. Obama’s Web ad, “The Life of Julia,” a silly and embarrassing caricature based on the assumption that women look to government at every meaningful phase of their lives for help.

. . .

In an effort to win them back, Mr. Obama is trying too hard. He’s employing a tone that can come across as grating and even condescending. He really ought to drop it. Most women don’t want to be patted on the head or treated as wards of the state. They simply want to be given a chance to succeed based on their talent and skills. To borrow a phrase from our president’s favorite president, Abraham Lincoln, they want “an open field and a fair chance.”

At Ace of Spades, Brewer adds:

More and more high profile personalities are speaking out. It’s starting to look like an Abilene paradox is breaking down, and we’re at the beginning of a full-blown preference cascade, described by Glenn Reynolds here:

This works until something breaks the spell, and the discontented realize that their feelings are widely shared, at which point the collapse of the regime may seem very sudden to outside observers – or even to the citizens themselves. Claims after the fact that many people who seemed like loyal apparatchiks really loathed the regime are often self-serving, of course. But they’re also often true . . . .

(Emphasis added.) If it starts to look like Obama is likely to lose, the left will turn on him fast. He lied to them, and they’re not happy. It’ll be the president’s problem or the messaging or the packaging, not the philosophy. They will turn on him to preserve their worldview.

No matter what happens in November, even more will be speaking out in the coming years; lots of rubes will want to come clean.

Such as this one: “Wapo’s Kathleen Parker: Republican’s aren’t wrong that we never vetted Obama sufficiently:”

The subject on the Chris Matthews show was the right wanting to emphasis Obama’s relationship with Jeremiah Wright, which they all agreed was playing the ‘race card’ which is idiotic. Matthews brought up the fact that while Romney doesn’t want to talk about Wright, Hannity certainly wants him to as he said so this week. Parker responded:

Well yeah Sean Hannity wants him to, a lot of Republicans do, a lot of the sorta further right people feel like ‘look we never vetted Obama sufficiently’, talking about us the media, and to some extent they’re not wrong about that. They do feel that we pulled back on Rev. Wright…

Gee, Kathleen, what on earth would give them that idea?

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Why, it’s as if there’s a tyranny of cliches that vexes the nation; Mike of the Cold Fury blog attempts to chart our “Topsy-turvy world:”

Okay, let me see if I have all this straight. Bill Clinton, a white Southerner, was the first black president. Obama, an apparently straight guy, is the first gay president. George Zimmerman, a Hispanic, is a white guy. Elizabeth Warren, the whitest white woman anybody ever saw, is an Injun.

Andrew Sullivan, a liberal, considers himself the last “true conservative.” The Democrat Socialists, left-wingers to a fault, consider themselves “centrist” or “moderate,” and Mitt Romney, who is a liberal, is a “right-wing extremist.” Of course, Mittens calls himself a “severe conservative,” although nobody really believes it. Not even the Democrat Socialists.

The overwhelming majority of people who call themselves “journalists” actually function as advocates, while laughably declaiming their unbiased impartiality to anyone gullible enough to buy it. Violent OWS revolutionaries are “mostly peaceful.” Layabouts who collect government benefits are “hard-working Americans,” and people who actually want to work but can’t find a job in the Obama Depression and have abandoned all hope aren’t even counted as unemployed at all. More than three straight years of economic stagnation in the Obama Depression is some kind of “recovery,” and as for the real people whose lives have been marred by the inevitable and predictable result of Obama’s muttonheaded policies, “you’d think they’d be saying thank you.”

Read the whole thing.

And then to see where it leads, click here.

Update: Related thoughts, expressed in visual form.

(Headline by Mr. E. Blair; found via SDA.)

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We’ve already seen network TV newscasters, who make seven figure annual incomes taking shots at Mitt Romney’s weath, but late night entertainers earn much more, especially David Letterman, whose network career stretches back to the early 1980s, first with NBC, later with CBS. As Noel Sheppard writes at Newsbusters, “David Letterman Mocks Romney’s Wealth Despite Being Worth $400 Million:”

You want to see a perfect demonstration of almost unimaginable media hypocrisy?

On Friday, CBS Late Show host David Letterman mocked Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s wealth despite being worth $400 million embedded by Embedded Video
Download Video :

DAVID LETTERMAN: I was talking to Mitt Romney earlier today, and he and his family got a big two day weekend planned. They’re going to hike to the top of his money.

Excuse me, but who the heck is Letterman to ridicule anyone for how much money they have?

According to our friends at Celebrity Net Worth, the Late Show host makes $50 million a year with an estate valued at $400 million.

As Forbes estimated Romney’s net worth at $230 million Wednesday, Letterman’s worth almost twice the target of his derision.

How’s THAT for hypocrisy?

Sometimes Dave’s just not all that thoughtful, it seems.

Related: Bain or Bane?

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“Sometimes you do wonder if [Republicans] are moles, Manchurian candidates for I don’t know who, if their real job is to bring down America.”

– Paul Krugman, appearing on MSNBC’s Martin Bashir Show yesterday.

Man, I wish you guys would make up your minds — Thomas Friedman wants us to be more like China (after previously wishing we were more like Cuba), even as Krugman has visions in his sleep of Laurence Harvey and the bald guy who later played Wo Fat in Hawaii Five-O. Meanwhile, Frank Rich (before he left the Times) imagined the GOP in late 2009 to be “Stalinists.” And that’s after the Times shilled for Stalin’s Soviet Union, and “Pinch” Sulzberger, their publisher, at least in his radical chic salad days, for communist Vietnam.

Given what a momentous development for a then-Timesman like Rich to use the word “Stalinist” as a pejorative, I did a Silicon Graffiti video titled “The Pinchurian Candidate” to document the occasion. Perhaps it’s worth revisiting in light of Krugman’s latest argument ad hominem.

Best to play a little solitaire while watching, though…

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Talk about getting a story completely bass-ackwards — or at the very least a headline. The Today Show asks, “Does organic food turn people into jerks?”

“I stopped at a market to get a fruit platter for a movie night with friends but I couldn’t find one so I asked the produce guy,” says the 40-year-old arts administrator from Seattle. “And he was like, ‘If you want fruit platters, go to Safeway. We’re organic.’ I finally bought a small cake and some strawberries and then at the check stand, the guy was like ‘You didn’t bring your own bag? I need to charge you if you didn’t bring your own bag.’ It was like a ‘Portlandia skit.’ They were so snotty and arrogant.”

As it turns out, new research has determined that a judgmental attitude may just go hand in hand with exposure to organic foods. In fact, a new study published this week in the journal of Social Psychological and Personality Science, has found that organic food may just make people act a bit like jerks.

“There’s a line of research showing that when people can pat themselves on the back for their moral behavior, they can become self-righteous,” says author Kendall Eskine, assistant professor of  the department of psychological sciences at Loyola University in New Orleans. “I’ve noticed a lot of organic foods are marketed with moral terminology, like Honest Tea, and wondered if you exposed people to organic food, if it would make them pat themselves on the back for their moral and environmental choices.”

OK, everybody repeat after me — I need a study to tell me this?

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Well, so much for Obama’s former agent falling on her sword: “A ‘Fact Checking Error’? Dystel & Goderich Ask Writers to Submit Their Own Bios.” Which has always been the case with every magazine article I’ve written — it’s the author’s job.

At Red State, Erick Erickson writes that the legacy media have yet again been caught flat-footed on the Obama literary bio story that Breitbart.com (with a powerful assist from Matt Drudge) broke yesterday. Naturally, in response, Erickson writes, the MSM is “claiming the story is no big deal, irrelevant, or that somehow the Breitbart Crew is in the wrong and peddling Birtherism.” And we’ve all heard this story before, as yet another beloved far left figure is caught cooking the books:

They are not peddling Birtherism. The Breitbart Crew are kind of like illegal immigrants — doing reporting Columbia journalism grads won’t do. And doing it quite well. In 2008, the New York Times ran a big story on John McCain having an affair with a lobbyist. It got picked up all over the place. Reporters were on the trail. There was no *there* there.

It took most of the month of August in 2004 for the media to pay attention to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth — men who served with John Kerry and had real problems with both his conduct in Vietnam and his conduct after he left Vietnam. The media did not want to cover the story. For a while, it was just Fox News. The clear demonstration of bias finally forced the New York Times and the big three nightly newscasts to play catch up as dismissively as possible.

This story has been out there since Barack Obama ran for the United States Senate. Even now the media is dismissing it as frivolous. If it turned out Mitt Romney had not actually been a missionary in France, it would be headline news.

Barack Obama embellishing his biography to make himself look unique? Hardly worthy of press attention. In fact, nothing Barack Obama has done suggesting serious character flaws — and that’s what this is about — is ever worth the media’s collective attention. Why? Because some people think Barack Obama was born in Kenya, but much of the press corps is pretty damn sure he was born in Bethlehem.

Moe Lane, where I found Erickson’s post, files it under the “[Quote of the Day,] It Explains So Much Edition.” But at this point, does the MSM still think Obama walks on water, or as in the 2004 and 2000 elections (and when they were pedaling Dean, Edwards, Hillary, etc.), any Democrat in a storm is better in the MSM’s jaundiced eyes than the alternative? That would also explain the enormous amounts of fear the MSM, and the Obama administration (and the two are deeply intertwined of course) have been pushing since the start of the year.

Erickson goes on to speculate that perhaps Obama claiming to be a Kenyan during his salad days in academia is why today, “the campaign screams bloody murder about racists and birthers every time someone asks about Barack Obama’s college transcripts?” Which takes us to Roger L. Simon’s latest post here at PJM:

Well, he might have wanted to glamorize his past, but if that’s so, it’s pathetic. I suspected there was a more substantive reason, one that would cause him to leave his African birth place in place in the bio. But to take the risk of being found out, it would have to be strong.

My wife Sheryl and I, like Nick and Nora Charles, discussed it over gimlets this evening. We both agreed the mystery lay somewhere in Obama’s college and university years at Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard. We knew, as you do, there must be an explanation for why the court eunuchs of the mainstream media have never bothered even to investigate the scholastic career of the most powerful person in the world.

Because Obama got bad grades? Yawn — so did Bush, Kerry, Biden, Ted Kennedy, and dozens of others who later found themselves making life or death decisions over our lives.

No, it had to be something more significant, more potentially dangerous. What if, we thought, as others have suggested, the reason Obama’s school records have not surfaced is that he enrolled, at one of those institutions at least, as a foreign student — a Kenyan?

But why would he choose to do that? Well, maybe for a grant, a subvention, a scholarship that was available uniquely to students from Africa or similar locales.

Yes, I know that’s not “fair,” in the lexicon of the Lord of Fairness, to have adopted a phony identity and deprived others of an opportunity they may have more richly deserved. But it would certainly fit with Obama’s early need to be recognized as a Kenyan by his agent and, presumably, his publisher. As we all know, it’s not the crime, but the cover-up. (In this case, actually, it’s both.)

As time went on, of course, college drifted away and politics reared its head. The Kenyan identity became less necessary, even a liability, so it was dropped.

I don’t know about you — but this makes sense to me. It also fits with the tomb-like silence around his college years.

Moe Lane adds:

This is just like the Elizabeth Warren affair, in two ways.  First off: the reason why Obama and Warren lied about their backgrounds is because the environment that they were in – liberal academia – wanted them to lie, and encouraged them to lie.  It made them more diverse, which made liberal institutions more diverse in hiring them, and in this particular case ‘diverse’ is semantically equivalent to ‘exotic.’  Second: if Obama or Warren had ever decided not to seek higher office – if they had decided that they were comfortable in their academic cocoon – they STILL would be claiming their faux-exotic status.

See also: Churchill, Ward.

Oh, and speaking of Elizabeth Warren, this is just pathetic if it’s true: “Did Elizabeth Warren Plagiarize Her ‘Pow Wow Chow’ Recipes?”

What also ties all of these stories together is something that I wrote about in 2004 — John Kerry assumed the MSM would bury his radical chic 1970s days; Obama assumed the MSM would bury Rev. Wright and his own radical chic years in academia, and Warren never thought anybody would check on her background. It’s infinitely easier to adjust the chocolate ration when the Ministry of Information is a closed shop (and there was much less information to go around, back when the news consisted of a half of local TV news, a half hour of national TV news, and a couple of wire services). Neither Warren nor Obama’s narratives were built to withstand serious scrutiny, which is what they’re now facing. But considering the left loved (and loves) the notion of the October Surprise to knock out their GOP opponents at the last minute, having turned von Clausewitz’s maxim on its head and transformed politics into an extension of warfare, they can’t complain much about the new media world they inadvertently helped to build.

Related: Bookworm asks, “Is Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, a 1978 case rejecting academic racial quotas, the smoking gun behind Obama’s Kenyan identity?” Read the whole thing.™

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Back in March, Ann Althouse had lots of fun with a New York Times article on “The Go-Nowhere Generation” on the “unexpectedly” sedentary nature of today’s youth. Althouse responded:

Isn’t that what the Boomer generation told them to do? Cars are bad. They are destroying the planet. Then, when they avoid driving, we scold them for being — what? — sedentary? unambitious? incurious?!

Similarly, having spent decades extolling the value of higher education and the payoff afterward of an Annie Hall and Alvy Singer-style lifestyle in midtown Manhattan, the New York Times is now running a series titled, “Degrees of Debt — This series examines the implications of soaring college costs and the indebtedness of students and their families.” The latest edition focuses on “A Generation Hobbled by the Soaring Cost of College:”

Kelsey Griffith graduates on Sunday from Ohio Northern University. To start paying off her $120,000 in student debt, she is already working two restaurant jobs and will soon give up her apartment here to live with her parents. Her mother, who co-signed on the loans, is taking out a life insurance policy on her daughter.

“If anything ever happened, God forbid, that is my debt also,” said Ms. Griffith’s mother, Marlene Griffith.

Ms. Griffith, 23, wouldn’t seem a perfect financial fit for a college that costs nearly $50,000 a year. Her father, a paramedic, and mother, a preschool teacher, have modest incomes, and she has four sisters. But when she visited Ohio Northern, she was won over by faculty and admissions staff members who urge students to pursue their dreams rather than obsess on the sticker price.

“As an 18-year-old, it sounded like a good fit to me, and the school really sold it,” said Ms. Griffith, a marketing major. “I knew a private school would cost a lot of money. But when I graduate, I’m going to owe like $900 a month. No one told me that.”

I learned a lot in college — but I’m pretty sure that even before I enrolled, I knew that loans were required to be paid back. Chevy Chase’s parody version of Gerald Ford may have been incensed about being blindsided by a complex no-win economic question during a presidential debate, but how does one enroll in college without understanding this basic fact of life?

Oh, and speaking of presidents, numbers and students, “Generation 44,” as our Zelig-like president dubbed them, is likely about to experience sticker shock:

President Obama’s fiscal 2013 budget proposal would double the interest rate on federally backed student loans from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent–eight months after the November presidential election.

The White House fiscal year 2013 plan calls for maintaining the current 3.4 percent interest rate for federally guaranteed student loans, but only through July 1, 2013, at which point it would automatically increase to 6.8 percent. Neither the president’s plan nor the Democrats’ legislation would extend the low rate beyond another year.

The president’s budget calls for “Suspending an Increase in Student Loan Interest Rates.” (See page 97).

“Under current law, interest rates on subsidized Stafford loans are slated to rise this summer [July 1] from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent,” reads the Obama budget. “At a time when the economy is still recovering and market interest rates remain low, it makes no sense to double rates on student loans. The Budget suspends the scheduled increase for the coming year, so that rates will remain at 3.4 percent.”

The Senate bill favored by Democrats states, “in the matter preceding clause (i), by striking ‘and before July 1, 2012,’ and inserting `and before July 1, 2013.’”

The Republican alternative legislation would also extend the low rate for only another year.

* * * * *

Obama has focused heavily on keeping student loan interest rates down to 3.4 percent in some of his recent speeches on college campuses. The youth vote helped boost his victory in 2008, where he beat John McCain by 34 percent among voters under 30, according to the Associated Press. However, last month a Harvard poll found that this year Obama is leading his Republican opponent Mitt Romney by 12 points (41%-29%) among voters aged 18 to 24.

The details of that last paragraph are explained in depth here.

Related: “What I Learned About Money in My Twenties.”

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The World Wildlife Federation, who along with a little help from Fairfax Media, a major media conglomerate in Australia and New Zealand, has made Earth Hour an annual eco-pagan “holiday” amongst the far left (including businesses either dumb enough to play along, or perhaps in the hopes of appeasement). But that isn’t their only effort at playing Chicken Little. This year, they managed to convince the New York Daily News (a center-left paper that should know better) to run an article titled “Two Earths would be needed to sustain human activity by 2030, report finds,” that’s really a glorified press release for the WWF:

Planet Earth in a tight spot.

Mankind is draining the earth’s resources so quickly the globe would be bled dry before the end of the century at this rate, a new report shows.

Humans are living outside their means, depleting natural resources like forests, air and water 50% faster than the planet can renew, according to the 2012 World Wildlife Fund’s “Living Planet Report” released this month.

If the trends aren’t reversed, by 2030 we’d need more than two Planet Earths to sustain human activity, according to the study.

“If we just do business as usual…we’re just going to continue moving in this direction. At some point, the earth’s going to just give out. We don’t know when. But that’s a pretty scary thing to think about,” said Colby Loucks, director of conservation science at WWF. “The question is, we don’t know what the tipping point is.”

But you sure know how to shout doomsday on a regular basis. In 2009, the WWF commissioned this ad, in both still and video versions, which they pulled at the last minute, perhaps risking the backlash from the general public over a form of agitprop that James Taranto once dubbed, “Green Supremacism:”

Having exploited 9/11 to play the Moral Equivalent of War cliche, a couple of months later, the WWF decided to use children as human shields for their next campaign:

That 2030 date randomly chosen by the WWF’s latest “report” is interesting — it’s at least far enough out that most people will have forgotten it by the time it arrives, unlike all of the “we only have five years/ten years/four years to save the earth” cri de coeurs, many of which date from the Bush administration era, and are coming due, and making the enviro-socialists who issued them look particularly silly. But it’s close enough to scare those who wish to be scared by the latest Malthusian doomsday scenario.

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“CNN Hits Lowest Primetime Demo Rating at 9 PM In 15 Years,” TV Newser  reports, adding that Piers Morgan’s show drew “only 39,000 viewers 25-54 at 9 PM.” At Big Journalism, John Nolte responds:

This is what happens when you insult your audience by pretending to be objective; what happens when you utilize dishonest fact-checking to downplay stories inconvenient to your left-wing agenda; what happens when you bring conservatives on in an attempt to embarrass them, only to see it backfire; what happens when you carry Obama’s racially divisive Trayvon Martin water and get it as wrong as anyone can; and what happens when some of your so-called talent is smug, ill-informed, insulting, and not terribly interesting.

CNN has a brand problem. For all their lunacy, at least MSNBC doesn’t insult their audience by hiding behind a phony shield of objectivity. Fox News does it exactly right by drawing a clear line between their straight news and opinion programs.

CNN should simply step out of the closet. Things can’t get any worse for them, that’s for sure. Not only that, they could probably do better than MSNBC because they have smarter people and, to be fair, some actual journalists, like Dana Bash.

Like General Motors during the late 1970s, CNN is attempting to sell an obsolete paradigm to an American public that knows better — viewers on both side of the aisle have made it clear that they want their news and opinion delivered by personalities whose opinions are known to them. That’s why Fox has prospered, and why MSNBC has bettered CNN in the ratings — whatever you think of O’Reilly and Hannity on the right, and Maddow and Al Sharpton on the left, you know what their worldview is, and can chose accordingly. Piers Morgan’s meltdown during his first go-around with Jonah Goldberg was particularly telling, as Mark Hemingway of the Weekly Standard noted in their latest issue:

Unfortunately, those most in need of freeing themselves from the tyranny of clichés are still bitterly clinging to their own transparent attempts to dismiss people who don’t share their worldview. Jonah Goldberg recently found himself on the receiving end of a contentious interview with CNN’s Piers Morgan, who, in the middle of the interview, made a point of defending an Obama attack ad about Mitt Romney while insisting he supports neither political party. “If you’re not batting for Democrats,” responded Goldberg, “it’s a wonderful approximation of it.” To which Morgan quickly responded: “Let’s deal with reality.”

Inadvertently or not, Morgan couldn’t have made the case for reading Goldberg’s book any better.

Exactly. “Objectivity,” as it was described by the networks, was a viable model in the 1950s, when television bandwidth was narrowly allocated, there was a (more or less) shared ideological consensus, and there were only three main channels for viewers to choose from. Today, DirecTV has hundreds of channels — why should viewers invest the time in watching someone without knowing where he stands?

Morgan replaced Larry King, the venerable liberal but lovable curmudgeonly host, who had built a reputation for himself on AM radio in the pre-Limbaugh 1980s before being tapped by CNN. Morgan was simply thrust upon the American public by CNN, which have clearly rejected the unctuous Brit.

On Monday, Inside Cable News reported that “CNN Hearts Jake Tapper,” the former Salon journalist who has also built up a reputation of being one of the few straight shooters in ABC’s TV newsroom. Presumably Tapper wouldn’t be replacing Morgan, but he would be the rarest of commodities at today’s CNN: a grown-up. God knows they need one there.

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Veteran public speaker Cavett Robert was fond of telling newcomers, “Don’t be in too much of a hurry to promote, until you get good. Otherwise you just speed up the rate at which the world finds out you’re no good.”

The Tea Party was born spontaneously in early 2009 but, with the exception of CNBC’s Rick Santelli, received little public support from the MSM (almost entirely the opposite, and that’s understating the case, as we all know). Unfortunately, Occupy Wall Street had far more ink than it knew what to do with in its early days last fall, thanks to an overwhelming superfluity of promoters in the legacy media who, along with Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and other Democrat politicians, were desperate to have a Tea Party-style movement of their own. Well, besides, as Glenn Reynolds noted last year, “the Coffee Party, the Brownbaggers, The Other 95%, A New Way Forward, the One Nation Movement— am I leaving any out? I can’t remember.”

Walter Russell Mead (who reminds us that he much prefers his tea “tasted with pinkies appropriately extended in the proper, traditional way”) pronounces OWS RIP today:

To some degree, it was killed by its “friends.” The tiny left wing groups that exist in the country jumped all over the movement; between them and the deranged and occasionally dangerous homeless people and other rootless wanderers drawn to the movement’s increasingly disorderly campsites, OWS looked and sounded less and less like anything the 99 percent want anything to do with. At the same time, the movement largely failed to connect with the African American and Hispanic churchgoers who would have to be the base for any serious grass roots urban political mobilization. The trade unions picked up the movement briefly but dropped it like a hot brick as they found the brand less and less attractive.

It is as if the Tea Party had been taken over by the Aryan Brotherhood and delusional vagrants while failing to connect with either evangelical Christians or respectable libertarians. The MSM at one point was visibly hungering and thirsting for exactly that fate of marginalization to happen to the Tea Party, and the MSM did its klutzy best to tar the Tea Party with that kind of Mad Hatter extremism. The Tea Partiers by and large (not always or cleanly) escaped the fatal embrace of the nutters and the ranters on their side of the spectrum; OWS was occupied by its own fringe, and so died.

OWS’s popularity continues to plummet. Many pollsters haven’t even bothered to ask the public about OWS since the protestors were kicked out of Zuccotti Park. The NBC/WSJ poll, one of the only reliable indicators of OWS support these days, shows OWS’s popularity has dropped by half since November. Over the same period NYC’s Mayor Bloomberg’s popularity has remained steady months after closing the sad and futile encampment at Zuccotti Park. No backlash there.

Of course, as Jonah Goldberg has written, what Occupy really needs (needed?) is a Republican president to protest against. At least during the mid-1960s, the nascent new left railed against LBJ, causing him to ultimately resign. If any Occupiers called for Obama’s resignation, I missed it; perhaps sensing that they would only speed up the preference cascade against him, the legacy media, despite going all in (and I mean, all in) for OWS, certainly didn’t play up any quotes along similar lines. Instead, we had the first “revolution” raging for the machine.

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Bill Maher isn’t letting the quick implosion of the Washington Post’s “bullying” story about Mitt Romney’s teenage days from stopping him embarrassing himself:

Appearing as a guest on Tuesday’s Conan show on TBS, HBO comedian Bill Maher absurdly suggested that recent allegations that Mitt Romney engaged in “bullying” in high school are worse than being molested by Michael Jackson, and asserted that he would be willing trade being beat up in grade school for being “gently masturbated by a pop star.”

Apparently, that last phrase is a stock part of Maher’s shtick; he’s used it before — here’s an excerpt from his May 3, 2005 appearance on the CBS Late Late Show, hosted by Craig Ferguson:

Bill Maher: “I think that there is no perspective. People have no perspective, especially about crime. You know, zero tolerance. You know, of course, nobody ever wants to see a child, you know, diddled. That’s just plain wrong. But even the people who are testifying against him, they’re saying that he serviced them. They didn’t service him.”

Craig Ferguson: “You don’t have kids, do you, Bill?”

Maher: “No.”

Ferguson: “No. I have a son. It makes me crazy, this thing, this Michael Jackson thing. It drives me, the idea of someone touching my kid, I would go, I nearly swore there. I’d go crazy.”

Maher: “Very wrong. But, you know, I remember when I was a kid. I was savagely beaten once by bullies in the schoolyard. Savagely beaten. If I had a choice between being savagely beaten and being gently masturbated by a pop star. It’s just me.”

Ferguson: “The always controversial Bill Maher, everybody.”

Maher: “What? That’s it?”

Ferguson: “Bill Maher. We’ll be right back with Rain Pryor.”

Based on that transcript, and the clip I once watched of the incident (which may still be available on YouTube), Ferguson had the good sense to get Maher off the air as quickly as possible. Would that Maher’s employers at Time-Warner-CNN-HBO have a similar level of decorum.

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