Everybody and his cousin in the starboard side of the Blogosphere has linked to the Daily Caller’s first expose inside the paranoid Media Matters bunker, the sequel to their brilliant 2010 reporting on the JournoList, the self-described “non-official campaign” in the Beltway media to help elect Obama president in 2008. And speaking of which, note this in yesterday’s article:

“The entire progressive blogosphere picked up our stuff,” says a Media Matters source, “from Daily Kos to Salon. Greg Sargent [of the Washington Post] will write anything you give him. He was the go-to guy to leak stuff.”

“If you can’t get it anywhere else, Greg Sargent’s always game,” agreed another source with firsthand knowledge.

Reached by phone, Sargent declined to comment.

“The HuffPo guys were good, Sam Stein and Nico [Pitney],” remembered one former staffer. “The people at Huffington Post were always eager to cooperate, which is no surprise given David’s long history with Arianna [Huffington].”

“Jim Rainey at the LA Times took a lot of our stuff,” the staffer continued. “So did Joe Garofoli at the San Francisco Chronicle. We’ve pushed stories to Eugene Robinson and E.J. Dionne [at the Washington Post]. Brian Stelter at the New York Times was helpful.”

“Ben Smith [formerly of Politico, now at BuzzFeed.com] will take stories and write what you want him to write,” explained the former employee, whose account was confirmed by other sources. Staffers at Media Matters “knew they could dump stuff to Ben Smith, they knew they could dump it at Plum Line [Greg Sargent’s Washington Post blog], so that’s where they sent it.”

Smith, who refused to comment on the substance of these claims, later took to Twitter to say that he has been critical of Media Matters.

Smith was also a self-confessed member of the JournoList; as Glenn Reynolds notes, MMFA and the JournoList share some remarkable traits:

Of course, to the extent that Media Matters affects coverage it’s because left-leaning journos regard it as legitimate, and want to help. In this regard, like JournoList, it’s a “self-herding device.”

And like the JournoList, a way to take ordinarily mild-mannered folks and whip them into a frenzied mob.

But Ed Morrissey, the source of our headline above, wonders if the Daily Caller didn’t out-think themselves and wound-up burying the lede on their story:

The actual story here might be the reverse of how Carlson et al frame it here.  This sounds as though the White House uses Brock and Media Matters to conduct a proxy war against its perceived enemies in the news media and to push its propaganda out through the MSM.  The DC’s descriptions of attacks on reporters and media outlets who don’t fall in line would make MMFA a very valuable pitbull for Jarrett and Obama, and one with some plausible deniability, at least until now.  This should really be the screaming red flag in the article, rather than some of the salacious tidbits about Brock.

Interestingly, just a few days ago someone else connected the White House to Media Matters, along with a warning that their relationship could cost Obama the next election.  The name of that right-wing nut?  Alan Dershowitz:

Read the whole thing (both Ed’s post and the underlying Daily Caller article).

Another timely question is posed by P.J. Salvatore of Big Journalism: “Who did MMfA tick off that so many sources as of late are throwing them under the bus?

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Near the end of his life, Osama Bin Laden gave up on his chosen profession, and advised his relatives to enter the 21st century, Walter Russell Mead writes:

The big news today: according to family members, by the end of his life Osama bin Laden was telling his family to “Go to Europe and America and get a good education.”

What? The great Islamic umma, center of global culture and light of the world has no universities where the children of the Great Jihadi can get a decent education?  The clueless, hell-bound infidels of Europe and America make the Sons of the True Faith look incompetent and backward on the vital matter of educating the young?  It isn’t enough to sit on a dirt floor in Pakistan memorizing the Koran and learning how to wear a suicide bomb vest?

But what about the obligation to take up the cause of jihad and violence and crush the evil doers in the West?

Never mind about all that, Osama supposedly told his children and grandchildren.  “Do not follow me down the road to jihad,” he said.  “You have to study and live in peace and don’t do what I am doing or what I have done.”

All those Salafi ideologues promoting the idea of jihad against the West as a sacred obligation compulsory on all Muslims are presumably choking on their beards as they read these words.  The homosexual-hangers and the adultress-stoners are having a bad morning. No doubt they will tell themselves that this story is yet another lie from the cynical west, but they will have to wrap themselves ever more tightly in the delusions and wishful thinking that blinker their thoughts — and undermine their political effectiveness.

They’ll give up on jihad right around the same time that ClimateGate convinces the a different group of religious zealots to change their own destructive course. (QED)

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Forget six degrees of separation — CNN’s Roland Martin is separated by only one — very famous — person away from President Obama. During the 2008 NAACP speech by Obama’s infamous, presumably former spiritual advisor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Martin was namechecked, along with his fellow CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien (who dubbed Wright’s speech “a home run” on the air) as a “long-term friend” by Wright. Martin has also had friendly chats on CNN with Wright’s equally inflammatory colleague Father Michael Pfleger. But just as Obama threw Wright under the bus almost immediately after the aforementioned speech — with CNN quickly following his lead — when one of Martin’s Tweets hit the fan at the start of week, Martin discovered that everybody’s expendable in the MSM:

Roland Martin, tweeted on Sunday, walked it back Monday, chastened on Tuesday, suspended on Wednesday…

That’s the short version of recent events in the life of the CNN commentator and author of Speak, Brother! A Black Man’s View of America.

The tale begins on Super Bowl Sunday, when Martin tweeted:

If a dude at your Super Bowl party is hyped about David Beckham’s H&M underwear ad, smack the ish out of him!

and

Who the hell was that New England Patriot they just showed in a head to toe pink suit? Oh, he needs a visit from #teamwhipdatass.

The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) took umbrage, immediately tweeting back:

@rolandsmartin Advocates of gay bashing have no place at @CNN #SuperBowl #LGBT.

The organization followed up with a statement demanding Martin’s dismissal.

As John Nolte writes at Big Journalism:

Fascistic GLAAD wins another scalp.

Over the years, CNN’s Roland Martin has said some awfully outrageous stuff about Republicans and the Tea Party — and not on his Twitter feed, but on the air at CNN. [Not to mention the rest of the country -- Ed] He’s pretty much accused us of being everything  just short of Nazis due only to legitimate policy differences we’ve had with his precious Barack Obama. As a response, the left-wing speech police — who disguise themselves as “media watchdogs” — have never (according to memory and Google) put any pressure on CNN to have Martin fired, suspended, or reprimanded.

And they shouldn’t. Martin has every right to be a racial demagogue, and CNN has every right to broadcast him. I don’t like the guy, but the thought of trying to silence him is anathema to everything I believe in. Unfortunately for Martin, the Washington Post and Politico aren’t big fans of the First Amendment and, as a result, just a few minutes ago it was reported that CNN has suspended Mr. Martin “for the time being.”

Martin’s sin? Tweeting a few childish jokes only a fascistic outlet like GLAAD could get away with pretending they are offended by.

Martin’s mistake? Martin inadvertently stepped into a trap he probably didn’t know existed, and as a result he is now receiving an invaluable lesson about today’s politically-correct hierarchy, where gay trumps black.

But a year ago, Martin himself was eager to join the rest of the leftwing MSM in its calls for a new civility in the wake of clip art that a crazed apolitical assassin likely never saw not leading to his shooting of Democrat Senator Gabrielle Giffords and others in Tuscon, in an editorial at CNN with the now ironic title, “After Tucson, will media tone it down?”

Note the first sentence in the quoted passage below:

If we are to embrace the notion of civility and humility in our discourse, that means not falling into our old habits. I was impressed that Roger Ailes, head of Fox News Channel, relayed to Russell Simmons’ GlobalGrind.com what he told his staff after the Tucson shootings: “I told all of our guys, shut up, tone it down, make your argument intellectually. You don’t have to do it with bombast. I hope the other side does that.”

Who knows if this edict will be photocopied and posted in the office of every Fox talk show host, and throughout its newsroom, to serve as a reminder to everyone when the nation moves further and further away from the shooting?

And he’s correct; those who vehemently oppose the views of Fox News and conservative radio hosts must also adhere to the president’s call for civility.

Maybe what we should all do is make “Remember Gabby and the Tucson 6″ buttons, T-shirts, and bumper stickers, as a way to stop someone in his tracks who chooses to get out of control.

Live by political correctness, die by it as well — or at least go into broadcasting purgatory. Or as Michael Graham asks at the Boston Herald, “What do the Catholic Church, Susan G. Komen for the Cure and CNN’s Roland Martin all have in common? They’ve all just been given a lesson in liberal ‘tolerance:’”

The most confused victim of the New Tolerance has to be CNN’s Roland Martin. All he did was send a tweet: “If a dude at your Super Bowl party is hyped about David Beckham’s H&M underwear ad, smack the ish out of him!”For reasons I don’t understand, this makes Martin a homophobe. GLAAD demanded he be pulled off the air, and his lame joke was labeled “the equivalent of cheerleading for violence against gays” in The Washington Post.

Now this isn’t David Duke. It’s Roland Martin — one of the New Tolerance thugs who has long played the race card in service of the liberal agenda.

If the left is willing to throw him under the bus, nobody is safe. Forget “Yes We Can!” Today it’s “You’ve Been Warned.”

Considering Martin’s impeccably radical chic connections, like the supine Outer Party member Parsons when he winds up in 1984′s Ministry of Love for political re-education and/or a visit to Room 101, he must have been astonished to find himself a victim of the same forces of political correctness — and correction — he’s long since championed. But then, as P.J. Salvatore writes at Big Journalism, “Nobody Expects The Progressive Inquisition.”

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Walter’s newspaper, which breaks out the airbrushes yet again:

Today’s speech by Iran’s Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, about the sanctions on his country and its determination to persist in its quest for nuclear capability was a significant news event. Khamenei served notice on the United States that he would not be bluffed into giving up his nuclear plans. Though he conceded the economic pressure on his country has hurt, he said Iran is undaunted and would retaliate against the United States should its nuclear facilities come under attack. All this was reported in newspapers around the world, including the New York Times, which posted a story on the speech Friday morning.

However, there was something missing from the Times report of Khamenei’s speech that was reported elsewhere. Other accounts noted that in addition to threatening the United States, Khamenei said this: “The Zionist regime is a cancerous tumor and it will be removed.” While we don’t know how or why a mention of this element of the speech managed to get excised from the account in the Times, it’s a question worth pondering.

Any discussion of the nature of the Iranian nuclear threat that ignores the regime’s murderous intentions toward Israel is clearly incomplete.

As we noted when Jill Abramson became the paper’s lead editor last year, “The Gray Lady Sure Knows Her Way Around an Airbrush.”

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Now is the time when the Small Dead Animals blog juxtaposes:

2011-09-27 – North Carolina Democrat Governor Bev Perdue suggests quite soberly & succinctly that Congressional elections should be suspended for two years.

2012-01-26 – Governor Bev Perdue announces that she will not be seeking a 2nd term because she has been “plagued by low approval ratings.”

Related: A Gaston, NC newspaper has published an editorial stating that Perdue “battled for her beliefs.” Not one word was mentioned of the Democrat politician’s very undemocratic remarks.

Which could be taken as a tacit endorsement of her “modest proposal,” if the paper takes its ideological cues from Big Brother up north.

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Occupy Wall Street and its offshoots such as Occupy DC (not to mention its supporters in the MSM) are all about increasing the already leviathan size and power of government — so they shouldn’t be at all surprised when that government turns on them as well:

In late 2009, a DC policeman was caught on video pulling his gun on a group of hipsters having a snowball fight, as several inches of global warming once again descended upon the city. Why wouldn’t those same police officers tase an unruly protester?

The news filtering out from the other Obamavilles might also be a reason why the DC police have itchy taser fingers: “Mostly Peaceful Occupy Oakland Thugs Hurl Bottles, Pipes, Rocks and ‘Improvised Explosive Devices’ at Police.” In-between their supporters issuing anti-Semitic manifestos.

Of course, there may well be more to come: “Summer 2012: Yes, They’re Planning To Riot,” David Steinberg warns at the Tatler.

Rage hard against the dying of the status quo!

Related: “MSNBC ‘Now’ Panel Bemoans How Occupy Movement’s ‘Moral Argument’ Has Been Drowned Out.” Yes, the stench from defecating on police cars (amongst other crimes and misdemeanors, olfactory and otherwise) tends to overwhelm the sweet smell of success.

Related: From anti-Semitism to anti-Catholicism: Occupy Protesters throw condoms at Catholic School Girls.

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When “liberal pundits” were raving over the concept of an “Arab Spring” last year, the facts on the ground were very often “unexpectedly” different from how the concept was sold to the rest of the world. Kate McMillan of Canada’s Small Dead Animals liked to quip at the time, “What We Really Need Is Democracy. With a totalitarian party to vote for.” At National Review Online last week, Andrew McCarthy wrote that from the so-called Arab Spring’s point of view, that’s a feature, not a bug:

Of course, conventional wisdom in the West holds that the Arab Spring spontaneously combusted when Mohamed Bouazizi, a fruit vendor, set himself ablaze outside the offices of the Tunisian klepto-cops who had seized his wares. This suicide protest, the story goes, ignited a sweeping revolt against the corruption and caprices of Arab despots. One by one, the dominos began to fall: Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya — with rumblings in Saudi Arabia and Jordan as well as teetering Syria and rickety Iran. We are to believe that the mass uprising is an unmistakable manifestation of the “desire for freedom” that, according to Pres. George W. Bush, “resides in every human heart.”

That proclamation came in the heady days of 2004, when the democracy project was still a Panglossian dream, not the Pandora’s box it proved to be as Islamic parties began to win elections. Like its successor, the Bush administration discouraged all inquiry into Islamic doctrine by anyone seeking to understand Muslim enmity, indulging the fiction that there is something we can do to change it. Inexorably, this has fed President Obama’s preferred fiction — that we must have done something to deserve it — as well as the current administration’s strident objection to uttering the word “Islam” for any purpose other than hagiography. In this self-imposed ignorance, most Americans still do not know that hurriya, Arabic for “freedom,” connotes “perfect slavery” or absolute submission to Allah, very nearly the opposite of the Western concept. Even if we grant for argument’s sake the dubious proposition that all people crave freedom, Islam and the West have never agreed about what freedom means.

Once again, a reminder that 1984 was a warning, not a user’s guide:

Winston was struck, as he had been struck before, by the tiredness of O’Brien’s face. It was strong and fleshy and brutal, it was full of intelligence and a sort of controlled passion before which he felt himself helpless; but it was tired. There were pouches under the eyes, the skin sagged from the cheekbones. O’Brien leaned over him, deliberately bringing the worn face nearer.

‘You are thinking,’ he said, ‘that my face is old and tired. You are thinking that I talk of power, and yet I am not even able to prevent the decay of my own body. Can you not understand, Winston, that the individual is only a cell? The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism. Do you die when you cut your fingernails?’

He turned away from the bed and began strolling up and down again, one hand in his pocket.

‘We are the priests of power,’ he said. ‘God is power. But at present power is only a word so far as you are concerned. It is time for you to gather some idea of what power means. The first thing you must realize is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual. You know the Party slogan: “Freedom is Slavery”. Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is freedom. Alone — free — the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal. The second thing for you to realize is that power is power over human beings. Over the body but, above all, over the mind. Power over matter — external reality, as you would call it — is not important. Already our control over matter is absolute.’

Or to put it another way, “Islam fits me really well,” a 34-year old music teacher in post-Christian Stockholm, Sweeden was quoted as saying in the L.A. Times in 2010 after he converted. “I am completely against capitalism.”

(H/T: 5′F.)

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Scheduled for release to the Kindle and in analog dead tree form in April — the 17th, not the 1st surprisingly — is The Occupy Handbook, complied by Janet Byrne and published by the Hachette Book Group, the second largest publisher in the world, according to Wikipedia.

The book’s Amazon description claims:

Analyzing the movement’s deep-seated origins in questions that the country has sought too long to ignore, some of the greatest economic minds and most incisive cultural commentators – from Paul Krugman, Robin Wells, Michael Lewis, Robert Reich, Amy Goodman, Barbara Ehrenreich, Gillian Tett, Scott Turow, Bethany McLean, Brandon Adams, and Tyler Cowen to prominent labor leaders and young, cutting-edge economists and financial writers whose work is not yet widely known – capture the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon in all its ragged glory, giving readers an on-the-scene feel for the movement as it unfolds while exploring the heady growth of the protests, considering the lasting changes wrought, and recommending reform. A guide to the occupation, THE OCCUPY HANDBOOK is a talked-about source for understanding why 1% of the people in America take almost a quarter of the nation’s income and the long-term effects of a protest movement that even the objects of its attack can find little fault with.

Since it’s likely still in pre-production, for completion’s sake, here are some helpful suggestions to flesh-out the book:

• Which police cars have the smoothest surface to excrete against.
• What not to say to the media when you’re interviewed after an altercation with the police.
• Why David Duke totally digs OWS.
• The camp rapist: misunderstood soul?
• How to be the first protest dedicated to preserving the status quo.
• How my $90,000 in student loans for a degree in deconstructionist lesbian poetry led me to spend 93 days sleeping in a tent in downtown New York.
• #Occupymobiusloop: How to run up your student debt even more studying #OWS.
• Occupy Your Backyard! It’s not just for ten year olds playing GI Joe anymore.
• How to win friends and influence people by terrorizing minimum wage bank tellers.
• Those who attempt to appease you are simply showing weakness — attack! — whether it’s 1939 or 2011.
• Radical Chic: look sharp — look Soviet!
• Left-wing anti-Semitism: the hot new trend for the 21st century.
• The Bible: Like the Constitution, it’s over 100 years old and outdated. Best to discard by throwing it at your enemies.
• Churches too are part of the 1 percent. Steal with impunity.
• JFK was a plutocratic One Percenter. Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country can do for you!
• If we’re so hip, how come the people supporting us are so damn old?
• Why is a prominent spokesman for General Electric supporting OWS?
• If we’re so radical and dangerous, why do establishment media sources like the New York Times, a major publishing house, and Time magazine think we’re so cool?

I’m sure there are numerous other topics that could help make this title the best it can be, so feel free to add yours in the comments. Or maybe just occupy the Hachette Book Group’s New York offices, since they’re giving such protests their blessing by going all in with them.

(Headline suggested by the eminent Abbot H. Hoffman.)

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A follow-up to an item I posted earlier this week while sitting in for the Instapundit. As MSNBC (of all places) notes, “Daimler AG apologized Thursday for using an image of Marxist revolutionary Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara during a promotional presentation for Mercedes-Benz cars:”

The image briefly appeared Tuesday during a presentation by Dieter Zetsche, head of Daimler’s Mercedes unit, at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It reproduced a famous Alberto Korda photo of Guevara, the Argentine communist who spearheaded the revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power in Cuba. The photo became a symbol of communist revolutionary movements during the 1960s and ’70s.

But in place of the star that adorns Guevara’s beret in the original, Mercedes affixed its corporate logo.

Activists reacted with horror to the appropriation of Guevara, whom many political conservatives and Cuban-Americans consider a mass murderer who helped subjugate Cuba.

“Mercedes-Benz Uses Communist Madman Che Guevara to Sell Luxury Cars,” said the headline on a blog post from the Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative political organization in Washington.

“Che Guevara, not to put too fine a point on it, was a psychopath whose sadistic lust for blood was not easily quenched. He killed for pleasure,” said the post, written by Heritage Vice President Mike Gonzalez.

In a statement Thursday to msnbc.com, Daimler said the image was just “one of many images and videos in the presentation,” which it said was intended to represent “the revolution in automobility enabled by new technologies, in particular those associated with connectivity.”

“Daimler was not condoning the life or actions of this historical figure or the political philosophy he espoused,” the company said, adding: “We sincerely apologize to those who took offense.”

Daimler’s statement was welcomed by Ernesto Suarez, who organized an online petition calling for Mercedes-Benz to apologize for using the image of a man the petition called “a racist, homophobic, anti-semitic and tyrannical killer who admitted in his own writing to his endless blood thirst.”

“I’m very satisfied with the reaction from Mercedes-Benz,” Suarez, a Cuban-American who lives in Kansas City, Mo., told msnbc.com Thursday evening. “I believe that they have done the right thing.

“The victory, if there is one, is not mine, but belongs to the descendants of [Guevara's] victims [and] the survivors, to common sense and to civility,” he said.

As I said at Instapundit, The Baader Meinhof Complex rolls on.

(Now if we could just convince Greenpeace not to use stormtroopers when protesting Volkswagen.)

Related: Back in late 2008, Nick Gillespie of Reason looked at the ubiquity of Killer Chic:

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“The short life of Gabriel Santorum would seem a curious priority for political discourse at a time when the Brokest Nation in History is hurtling toward its rendezvous with destiny,” Mark Steyn writes in his weekly column. “In 2008, the Left gleefully mocked Sarah Palin’s live baby. It was only a matter of time before they moved on to a dead one:”

There is something telling about what Peter Wehner at Commentary rightly called the “casual cruelty” of Eugene Robinson. The Left endlessly trumpets its “empathy.” President Obama, for example, has said that what he looks for in his judges is “the depth and breadth of one’s empathy.” As he told his pro-abortion pals at Planned Parenthood, “we need somebody who’s got the heart – the empathy – to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom.” Empathy, empathy, empathy: You barely heard the word outside clinical circles until the liberals decided it was one of those accessories no self-proclaimed caring progressive should be without.

Indeed, flaunting their empathy is what got Eugene Robinson and many others their Pulitzers – Robinson describes his newspaper column as “a license to feel.” Yet he’s entirely incapable of imagining how it must feel for a parent to experience within the same day both new life and death – or even to understand that the inability to imagine being in that situation ought to prompt a little circumspection.

The Left’s much-vaunted powers of empathy routinely fail when confronted by those who do not agree with them politically. Rick Santorum’s conservatism is not particularly to my taste (alas, for us genuine right-wing crazies, it’s that kind of year), and I can well see why fair-minded people would have differences with him on a host of issues from spending to homosexuality. But you could have said the same thing four years ago about Sarah Palin – and instead the Left, especially the so-called feminist Left, found it easier to mock her gleefully for the soi-disant retard kid and her fecundity in general. The usual rap against the Right is that they’re hypocrites – they vote for the Defense of Marriage Act, and next thing you know they’re playing footsie across the stall divider with an undercover cop at the airport men’s room. But Rick Santorum lives his values, and that seems to bother the Left even more.

Read the whole thing.

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“This is what our politics is today. Figure out who is doing the behavior and work backwards from there to determine whether it should be celebrated or denounced.”

– Jim Geraghty on “Eugene Robinson, Child-Mourning Procedure Evaluator-In-Chief.”

Read the whole thing.™

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Well, sort of. Somebody named Dean Obeidallah, whom CNN’s Website describes as the “executive producer of the annual New York Arab-American Comedy Festival and the Amman Stand Up Comedy Festival” pens a laugh-an-hour piece for the network titled, “Santorum wants to impose ‘Judeo-Christian Sharia.’” *

That’s good, right? Especially considering that CNN has never met a radical chic Islamofascist terrorist it didn’t want to either embrace or explain away (or bury its head in the sand over). Besides, it was only last year that CNN’s Soledad O’Brien (she of the Rev. Wright “home run”) was encouraging her guests to discuss the benefits of the real thing:

O’BRIEN (on-camera): When the opposition talks about Sharia law, they talk about it coming here to America-

LEMA SBENATY: Yes.

O’BRIEN: Oppressing women, torture, beating- do they have it wrong?

SBENATY: Yes, they do. A lot of things that are culture have been mistaken for religion. The Koran that I have read has never said torture was okay for anyone or beating women, you know, it was okay. None of this is okay.

O’Brien reenforced this understanding of Sharia law in her following two sound bites, one coming from Mr. Sbenaty himself, and the other from Noah Feldman of Harvard University:

SALEH SBENATY: What Sharia is, is a way of life. You know, I am mandated, as a Muslim, to pray five times, I am mandated to fast during the month of Ramadan, and I’m mandated, if I am able to, to go and to pilgrimage. That’s Sharia law for me.

NOAH FELDMAN, HARVARD INTERNATIONAL LAW (on-camera): Sharia, according to Muslims, is God’s word on how you’re supposed to live your life-

O’BRIEN (voice-over): Noah Feldman is a professor of International Law at Harvard. He’s written several books on Islam and Sharia law.

FELDMAN: If you look across the Muslim world, you can see a lot of difference in how customs and practices operate among people, all of whom believe that they are following the Sharia.

FELDMAN (voice-over) As a general matter, the Sharia is what you make of it, and there are plenty of Muslims who interpret the Sharia in a progressive way, so that it’s equal towards women and progressive towards women.

Now there’s a take-away sound bite: Sharia — it’s the progressive, equal rights way!

* Or as Santorum like to call his religion, no doubt speaking in cryptofascist code, Catholicism.

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“It tells you something about the culture in which we live that in some quarters those who routinely champion abortion, even partial-birth abortion, are viewed as enlightened and morally sophisticated while those grieving the loss of their son, whom they took home for a night before burying, are mercilessly mocked,” Peter Wehner writes at Commentary. “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the times,” and “journalists” for those times:

First it was Alan Colmes; now it is Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post, who went on MSNBC to mock Rick Santorum for how he and his wife Karen dealt with the death of their son Gabriel. (A severe prenatal development led to his very early delivery, and Gabriel died two hours after his birth.)

We have former Speakers of the House who are praising constitutional assaults on Congress by the president; if we’re going to go full Weimar, we might as well have the journalists to match.

Or, maybe not. Walter Russell Mead believes that such power plays by the left betray a profound weakness in 2012:

Republicans then go into 2012 likely to hold the House and take the Senate, and with a solid chance of taking the White House as well.  For Democrats, this is shaping up as an election in which they try to limit losses: a far cry from the historic realignment they were dreaming of three short years ago.

Via Meadia is not in the soothsaying business; this is not intended as an election forecast.  But after months of horse race coverage in Iowa, it makes sense to step back from the day to day headlines and spend a little time thinking about how the big picture is starting to shape up.  The playing field is tilting away from the Democrats this year; after running the table in 2008, Democrats face losing it all this time around.

Which may explain much behind the recent rash choices by Obama, Robinson, Colmes and Pelosi: fear of losing it all is a powerful motivator. The GOP elite seems equally scared of success; will their base play the decisive factor, even with what ultimately will be a far from perfect candidate, whoever he ultimately turns out to be?

Related: “Remember this the next time they launch one of their bogus ‘new civility’ campaigns.”

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In Commentary this month, George Russell has an article (subscription may be required to read) that’s ostensibly a review of new history of Jim Jones. But it’s much more of a reminder, as the title of his article suggests, of the root causes of one of the great holocausts of the 1970s: Jim Jones and the mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana, on November 18, 1978:

It is one of the virtues of A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown (Free Press, 320 pages)—a fascinating if sometimes ill-organized exhumation of the Peoples Temple cataclysm—that its author, Julia Scheeres, strips away the romantic nihilism of the preacher’s last message to reveal what lay at Jonestown’s horrifying core. Jonestown is a ghastly monument to a psychopathic madman—but he was a Marxist madman, who had long since spurned the Bible in favor of cosmic revolutionary struggle. “Stop your hysterics,” he urged his screaming flock as they shuffled toward the casks of poison. “This is not the way for people who are socialists or Communists to die.”

Scheeres, whose deep sympathy for the ordinary, hapless members of the Peoples Temple seeps through on almost every page, does them a huge favor in demonstrating that Jonestown was not a ghoulish failure at building the kingdom of heaven on earth. It was a North Korea fashioned for lost American souls.

“For some unexplained set of reasons, I happen to be selected to be God,” Jones declared in 1973, at a time when he was still being hailed as an apostle of social justice in California. It is closer to the truth to say that Jones was a self-selected Kim Jong-il—a narcissistic psychopath who created a totalitarian slave-labor camp in the name of anti-imperialism and rejection of “fascist” America, and who threatened Götterdämmerung whenever his craziest self-aggrandizing fantasies were thwarted. Eventually, Götterdämmerung came.

Jones was, in other words, a more deviant than usual by-product of the subcultural political madness of the Vietnam era.

As Russell notes, “909 people died at Jonestown, 304 of them minors and 131 of them under the age of 10. Only 631 of them were ever identified. Popular culture almost immediately memorialized the horror as a collective expression of death-dealing Christianity turned in on itself.”

That’s how I remember the story being reported in news back then, which for most people consisted of three commercial TV networks, a couple of big city newspapers, and a pair of news magazines. Jonestown, particularly for those who caught the story in a three or four minute network TV news report, was immediately presented to the world as a religious cult gone wrong, sort of a super-sized Manson family tragedy, no way infused with politics, particularly of a leftist variety.

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Until the rise of first conservative forums such as Free Republic in the mid-1990s (who would later instantly pounce on Dan Rather’s forged documents in September of 2004), and then Matt Drudge and eventually the Blogosphere, most consumers of news had little idea of how the sausage was made, other than sensationalistic Hollywood productions such as All the President’s Men and Lou Grant. The one exception prior to the rise of the Web might have been during the early 1980s. That was when the first commercially available satellite dishes went on the market, and savvy users with early VCRs recorded television journalists beaming their videotaped reports across the country and anchormen prepping for the nightly news, before the networks started scrambling their product to prevent unwanted downloads. The sort of “found footage” collected by Harry Shearer is typical of this genre.

But once the Blogosphere took off, and people who had an interest in exploring how the media actively shapes the news (or attempts to create it, in the case of Dan and his producer) could start trading blogposts, moments such as this became increasingly common. Here’s the image of Cindy Sheehan and Al Sharpton the way that the MSM (and Sheehan and Sharpton) wanted you to see them in 2005:

Here’s the sausage being made:

In the Middle East, manufacturing dissent is done on an assembly line basis. Occasionally though, it’s possible to pull the camera back a bit, in some cases, literally. As Ben Domenech writes at Ricochet, “Stop what you’re doing and watch this pretty incredible video on photojournalism and propaganda, from Ruben Salvadori:”

At Power Line, Steve Hayward adds:

There were a few reported instances back in the late 1960s and early 1970s where TV crews showed up at college campuses with anti-war signs to pass out to students to make sure they got the right visuals.  And then there’s this devastating expose by a young Italian journalist named Ruben Salvadori about how photojournalists have become not merely part of the story of Palestinian unrest on the West Bank, but the instigators of it.

I hadn’t heard reports of the MSM actually handing out protest signs, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least. I do know the story that Tom Wolfe told Bill Moyers of PBS, when he was promoting The Bonfire of the Vanities, which we’ll quote right after the page jump.

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Over at the Lifestyle blog, John Hawkins rounds up “The 10 Biggest Failures Of 2011.” But as Jonah Goldberg writes in his own year-end round-up, 2011 was the year that everybody blew it:

The Occupy movement’s meager tangible accomplishments (We recycled our own urine!) are inversely correlated with their lavish press coverage. The protesters were named Time magazine’s person of the year. Though in fairness, Time diluted its sycophancy by including the Arab Spring protesters who’ve (so far) ushered in a glorious new era of Islamism in places such as Egypt. Winning!

(Though perhaps not as clear cut a “win” as President Obama’s decision to declare political victory and pull our troops out of Iraq prematurely, so we can lose a war we sacrificed so much to win.)

Back home, tea-party politicians who truly won historic midterm-election victories are cast as dangerous losers. The Occupiers lost their bongs and yurts to bulldozers in cities across America, but museums around the country are nonetheless desperate to acquire authentic Occupy-movement artifacts to commemorate their glorious but unspecified successes. Unfortunately, the tea parties cannot work the refs of history this way, because they clean up their mess after they get together.

No word if the Smithsonian collected some genuine Occupier scat to be preserved next to the alleged specimens from the Yeti and Sasquatch. Lord knows they left enough behind for others to scoop.

And so it goes. The economy continued to languish while the president declared victory over a Depression that never was and touted himself as the most legislatively successful president ever — with the “possible exceptions” of FDR, LBJ, and Lincoln.

Meanwhile, we are approaching the third year of the long winter Obama once celebrated as a “recovery summer.” Its chief selling points are an unemployment rate statistically lowered by more Americans giving up hope of finding a job, and the claim that millions of jobs have been “created or saved.” This bogus locution allows Obama to claim every job he doesn’t destroy as a win.

And let us not forget the Republicans, whose feckless squad of A-Team candidates stayed on the bench for fear of joining the mosh pit of cannibalism the primary has become, setting the stage for a potential loss in 2012 that not even Charlie Sheen will be able to spin as a victory.

Speaking of attempting to spin a disaster, at Big Government, in a lengthy read-the-whole-thing article which sums up the key events of the past several months, Andrew Breitbart notes how badly the MSM attempted to spin like a dreidel over Occupy Wall Street for numerous reasons, not the least of which was because they were so deeply in the (septic) tank with the movement:

From the beginning, Occupy Wall Street was a huge progressive political Lollapalooza, an operation supported by unions and Democrats, planned and coordinated by career anarchists, and populated by students and fellow travelers. It quickly descended into a circus, a freak show, and a crime scene. The Breitbart sites actively chose to do what the mainstream media refused to do: hyper-focus on what was really going on. In so doing, we stumbled upon proof that key members of the media—including the New York Times, MSNBC, and Rolling Stone—were acting as public relations strategists and provocateurs on behalf of the Occupy movement.

There’s your “Story of the Year,” Time Magazine.

The Obama campaign, the Democratic Party, and the media colluded in an attempt to create class war in America in the pursuit of getting President Obama re-elected and ending the momentum of limited government conservatism as embodied in the Tea Party. Occupy’s crimes were committed by members of a movement whose goal was to neutralize the power of the Tea Party. And killing the Tea Party to keep the Democrats and President Obama afloat is now the mainstream media’s number one objective—by any means necessary.

The first proof of media coordination emerged in an email archive obtained by the Breitbart sites. It showed that MSNBC host Dylan Ratigan and Rolling Stone political editor Matt Taibbi had participated in a private group email chain with Occupy’s behind-the-scenes organizers—the bulk of whom are anarchists, socialists, communists, and anti-Israel activists, along with sundry international rabble-rousers of all stripes. Ratigan and Taibbi advised the nascent movement on its message and how to grow the group effectively to be a left-wing version of the Tea Party.

The email chain revealed the involvement of the usual suspects behind many international socialist and anarchist driven protests, including anti-WTO, anti-G8, and anti-G15 events; the people behind the manufactured Cindy Sheehan “Camp Casey” occupation outside of President George W. Bush’s Crawford, Texas ranch; and even the “GOP Welcoming Committee” group that rioted against the 2008 Republican convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. The latter featured the arrests of key participants tied to Occupy organizer Lisa Fithian, who are now in federal prison for a botched plan to use Molotov cocktails on the GOP delegates and the police protecting them.

The mainstream media, which are promoting Occupy in their year-end wrap-ups, will not connect these basic dots. Instead they choose to ignore the dots and attack those who point them out. The key struggle in America today is over the narrative: on one side the old media (New York Times, ABC, CBS, NBC, Washington Post, CNN, Time, Newsweek), and on the other side the new media. The latter is a samizdat amalgam of independent blogs, talk radio shows, Fox News, and social media like Twitter and Facebook which have helped to make the samizdat drumbeat louder. They are forcing old media to acquiesce and are further exposing that media’s obvious biases while further dwindling old media’s former captive audience.

While we had lots of fun earlier this month Photoshopping an alternative cover for Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” story, Andrew has an even better choice for Time’s editors, which you’ll have to click over to read. In the meantime, a related video on OWS found at Small Dead Animals:

Elsewhere in news of fresh disasters and MSM journalists risking, as Jonah might say, scrotal torsion, at the Washington Examiner, Gene Healy rounds up “the Five worst op-eds of 2011.”

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Back in March of 2009, Kevin Williamson of National Review explored “Losing Gordon Gekko: Wall Street has gone over to the Democrats. Should conservatives miss it?” In his latest article at NR, he explores what the left got for their money:

For a few measly millions, Wall Street not only bought itself a president, but got the start-up firm of B. H. Obama & Co. LLC to throw a cabinet into the deal, too — on remarkably generous terms. President Obama, for a guy prone to delivering prim and smug little homilies denouncing greed, greed, greed — the only of the seven deadly sins that truly offends Democrats (though Mrs. Obama has done some desultory work on gluttony) — is strangely comfortable among the Gordon Gekkos of this world. Shall we have a partial roll call? Beat the drum slowly and call out the names: With unemployment still topping 9 percent, the catastatic world economy teetering on the brink of another, even larger financial catastrophe, and trillion-dollar U.S. deficits as far as the green-shaded eye can see, let’s hear it for Obama’s first National Economic Council director, Lawrence Summers (of hedge-fund giant D. E. Shaw and venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz), who has had some nice paydays courtesy of Lehman Bros., JPMorgan Chase, and Citigroup. Let’s hear it for Citigroup’s Michael Froman, deputy assistant to the president and deputy national-security adviser for international economic affairs, for Hartford Financial’s Neal Wolin, deputy Treasury secretary, for JPMorgan’s William Daley, Obama’s chief of staff, and for his predecessor, Rahm Emanuel of Wasserstein Perella. Let’s hear it for Fannie Mae’s Tom Donilon, national-security adviser. (No, seriously: One of the luminous interstellar geniuses who brought Fannie Mae to its current aphotic state of affairs, upside down to the tune of trillions of dollars, is running national security, and the former director of the White House Military Office, Louis Caldera, was on the board of IndyMac when it finally went toes up — sleep tight, America!) And, lest we forget, let’s have three big, sloppy cheers for economic-transition team leaders Robert Rubin (Goldman Sachs, Citigroup) and folksy tax enthusiast/ghoulish billionaire vulture Warren Buffett.

That’s a pretty fantastic lineup, from Wall Street’s point of view, but the real bonus turned out to be Treasury secretary Tim Geithner, who came up through the ranks as part of the bipartisan Robert Rubin–Hank Paulson–Citigroup–Goldman Sachs cabal. Geithner, a government-and-academe man from way back, never really worked on Wall Street, though he once was offered a gig as CEO of Citigroup, which apparently thought he did an outstanding job as chairman of the New York Fed, where one of his main tasks was regulating Citigroup — until it collapsed into the yawning suckhole of its own cavernous ineptitude, at which point Geithner’s main job became shoveling tens of billions of federal dollars into Citigroup, in an ingeniously structured investment that allowed the government to buy a 27 percent share in the bank, for which it paid more than the entire market value of the bank. If you can’t figure out why you’d pay 100-plus percent of a bank’s value for 27 percent of it, then you just don’t understand high finance or high politics.

At the risk of sounding overly cynical, it almost seems like Obama’s hectoring of Wall Street and his support of OWS — before it was tossed down the memory hole by the MSM — is all just so much kabuki for the rubes. But definitely read the whole thing.

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Even by the standards of General Electric’s on-air representatives or the Walter Duranty-era New York Times and their pro-Stalin hagiography, this is pretty creepy stuff:

Photographs show he has his grandfather’s double chin and dark eyebrows, and his haircut supposedly is a throwback to the older man’s style in the 1940s. Some reports speculate that Kim Jong Un has even undergone plastic surgery to make him look more like his popular grandfather, North Korea founder Kim Il Sung, and less like his father, Kim Jong Il, who was not as well-liked.

Whether the resemblance to his grandfather has been inherited and/or surgically enhanced, it sure can’t hurt Kim Jong-Un, his late father’s handpicked successor to lead North Korea, psychologist Robert Bornstein says.  He’ll likely benefit from the experience many of us have had of feeling warmly toward a person we’ve just met  simply because they resemble someone we like.

If not, the machine guns and concentration camps should do the trick.

Just a reminder — here’s CNN’s workers’ paradise-style video look at North Korea last year:

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As Steve Barton writes at Newsalert, “Go to the 10:05 marker in the video: Rachel Maddow says she’s ‘someone who’s roughly to the left of Mao.’”

It’s just a quip from her little red joke book — I think — but add to Maddow’s expression of her worldview, table-pounding Lawrence O’Donnell who said “I am a socialist,” and “I live to the extreme left,” on the air last year at MSNBC.

Back in 2007, the New York Times dubbed MSNBC “a liberal version of Fox News;” a description that network executive Phil Griffin tacitly concurred with, saying that network finding its ideology “happened naturally,” which it would express overtly in its progressive-themed “Lean Forward” campaign last year (which as critics noted, has an echo of Mao’s Great Leap Forward slogan as well.)

P.J. O’Rourke once wrote that “commies love concrete,” which, if she isn’t kidding, might help to explain Maddow’s otherwise incongruous love of mid-century dam building efforts now eschewed by the rest of today’s environmentally correct far left, including those who staff her employer, General Electric.

But hey, give credit for Maddow and O’Donnell for not biting their Mao Tse-tungs and coming clean on some level about their far left ideology. In its own socialistic way, it makes for a refreshing change from most old media news outfits. At CBS, for years, Walter Cronkite uttered “That’s the way it is” before signing off, his Solomonic vow towards objectivity, before retiring to host fundraisers for an organization devoted to bringing about one-world government. His successor, Dan Rather, clothed his own claims to objectivity inside such goofy Ratherisms as “I’m in favor of strong defense, tight money, and clean water. [Ideologically,] I don’t know what that makes me.” Before being forced out over Ra^therGate and retiring to host programs on HD-Net, the cable network owned by Mark Cuban, who produced a spate of anti-Bush movies in the naughts, professed to voting for Obama in 2008, and ran the ‘Truther” “documentary” Loose Change on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Not to mention Rather hosting fundraisers in recent years for far left The Nation magazine.

Of course, perhaps the most objective response to MSNBC’s far left collective ideology came from a rather unlikely source:

“To be fair about it, the NABJ understood that if I didn’t get it, it wouldn’t have gone to a journalist,” Sharpton tells me. “It’s a moot point. There are no journalists [as hosts] after 5 p.m. on MSNBC. Everyone after 5 deals with opinions. So the argument is kind of apples and oranges.”

There are no journalists on MSNBC’s nighttime lineup? No kidding, Reverend Bacon, no kidding.

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Accuracy in Media has a little Alinksy-inspired video fun with their local Occu-gang, asking them how they feel to be included in Time magazine’s collective (and collectivist) Man of the Year story, “The Protestor:”

As Tina Korbe notes at Hot Air, only one of the Occupiers who made AIM’s final cut gets Time magazine’s intent, catching the irony that “Time magazine is itself a part of a media conglomerate (a.k.a. a corporation, the 1 percent, the Man, the Machine). To be honored by them, then, the lone protester said, is actually a ‘slap in the face.’”

The rest apparently are merely happy to be seen in dentists’ offices and supermarket checkout lines. Although the overenthusiastic young woman who shouts “meta! meta! meta!” upon seeing the Time cover, along with her belief that the Arab world created everything before…well, before something happened to stem an earlier inventiveness may actually be on to something.

Time’s favorite protesters both here and abroad have several unsavory connections. A headline up yesterday at Ace of Spades noted:

Demonic convergence for Christmas: Iranian regime will sponsor a cartoon contest in support of #OWS. No wonder: #OWS DC flying Hamas and Hezbollah flags.

As Mackubin Thomas Owens wrote in September of 2002, “9/11 revealed an emerging geopolitical reality: that the world’s most important fault line is not between the rich and the poor, but between those who accept modernity and those who reject it.”

Speaking of which, it’s too bad AIM didn’t show their interviewees our suggestion for the cover Time should have run with…

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