As we mentioned on Friday, back on January 19, 2011, during the height of the left’s brief “new civility” tirade, CNN, which for 23 years hosted a popular debate show called Crossfire (which featured crosshairs in its logo), had this treacly moment:
On Tuesday’s John King USA, CNN’s John King issued a prompt on-air apology minutes after a guest on his program used the term “crosshairs” during a segment: “We’re trying to get away from using that kind of language” (audio available here). This action stands in stark contrast to an incident over a year earlier where former anchor Rick Sanchez took four days to apologize for using a unconfirmed quote attributed to Rush Limbaugh.
Flash-forward to 2012. CNN newsreader Roland Martin recently returned to the network after being suspended as a result of a Tweet that was perceived by his employers as being homophobic. Adding to the strangeness of that outburst, Martin seemed so eager last year to join the rest of the leftwing MSM in its calls for a new civility.
Bear with me for a moment as I try to reconstruct the MSM’s collective “logic” during that period. In the wake of clip art that a crazed apolitical assassin likely never saw being determined by the MSM as somehow leading to the shooting of Democrat Senator Gabrielle Giffords and others in Tuscon, Martin wrote 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.
Of course, when Rev. Wright calls you “my long term friend,” no wonder the rest of the world can sometimes seem so off-kilter:
Update: Via Instapundit, who dubs Martin’s latest outburst “Stalinesque Media Hate Speech,” Tom Blumer writes atNewsbusters, “Though tempting, it might not be a good idea to lobby CNN to suspend Martin again. I sort of like how he’s showing the world who he really is, and what his continued employment says about the network which employes him.”
More: Welcome readers clicking in from Instapundit, and the PJ Media homepage.
The above clip brings new meaning to the question we’ve been asking for a decade now: What’s gotten into the water at CNN?
To paraphrase Iowahawk, Fire Make Sea Gods Angry, cause sharks to “Have Sex at Alarming Rates” according to the Chyron under this story told by CNN newsreader Erin Burnett. All that undersea aquatic humping will produce baby “Super Sharks,” Burnett adds.
Needless to say, Tim Blair is having lots of fun with this Fish Story:
What’s truly disturbing is that the story is more than two months old yet CNN still managed to get it completely wrong. No “experts” speculated that hybrid sharks were caused by climate change. That line emerged from a piece by angry leftist AFP reporter Amy Coopes, whose expertise is mainly in the field of conservative devil babies.
Actual shark expert Jessica Morgan, one of the researchers for the University of Queensland’s study, had this to say back in January:
Quote not correct – I have now stated numerous times that it is extremely unlikely that climate change caused the hybridization event …
Sweet dreams, Erin. Don’t let the super sharks bite.
And speaking of CNN’s news readers, just as Soledad O’Brien had attempted to spin Critical Race Theory into something it wasn’t — and failed so badly that she was forced to cry uncle on all of the negative Tweets she was receiving, Flopping Aces notes that she had previously tried to claim that Obama wasn’t familiar with Saul Alinsky. Good luck with that:
• Obama first learned Alinsky’s rules in the 1980s, when Alinskyite radicals with the Chicago-based Alinsky group Gamaliel Foundation recruited, hired, trained and paid him as a community organizer in South Side Chicago. (Gamaliel’s website expressly states it grew out of the Alinsky movement.)
• In 1988, Obama even wrote a chapter for the book “After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois,” in which he lamented organizers’ “lack of power” in implementing change.
• Gamaliel board member John McKnight, a hard-core student of Alinsky, penned a letter for Obama to help him get into Harvard Law School.
• Obama took a break from his Harvard studies to travel to Los Angeles for eight days of intense training at Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation, a station of the cross for acolytes.
• In turn, he trained other community organizers in Alinsky agitation tactics.
• Obama also taught Alinsky’s “Power Analysis” methods at the University of Chicago.
• During the presidential campaign, Obama hired one of his Gamaliel mentors, Mike Kruglik, to train young campaign workers in Alinsky tactics at “Camp Obama,” a school set up at Obama headquarters in Chicago. The tactics helped Obama capture the youth vote like no other president before him.
• Power would no longer be an issue, as Obama infiltrated the highest echelon of the political establishment — the White House — fulfilling Alinsky’s vision of a new “vanguard” of coat-and-tie radicals who “work inside the system” to change the system.
• After the election, his other Gamaliel mentor, Jerry Kellman (who hired him and whose identity Obama disguised in his memoir), helped the Obama administration establish Organizing for America, which mobilizes young supporters to agitate for Obama’s legislative agenda using “Rules for Radicals.”
• Obama’s favorite rule is No. 13: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it.” You see that in his attacks on “fat cat bankers,” “greedy health insurers” and “millionaires and billionaires.” He also readily applies Alinsky’s fifth rule of “ridiculing” the opposition.
“Obama learned his lesson well,” said David Alinsky, son of the late socialist. “I am proud to see that my father’s model for organizing is being applied successfully beyond local community organizing.”
In recently revealed emails, the oh-so-chic (at least according to Vogue) Asma claims to be the real “dictator” in the Assad home and even makes jokes about Homs, where civilians are being shelled by her husband. Making Marie Antoinette look like a piker, she spends her time shopping online, evidently under various pseudonyms, while the people of her country are murdered.
Now as many will recall, Asma was the subject of a fawning interview in Condé Nast’s Vogue last March entitled “A Rose in the Desert.”
Oops, you may have noticed you get a 404 “page not found” at the link, replete with a Vogue model no less. That’s because the magazine has scrubbed the article.
If you’re looking for it, it’s here, thanks to The Atlantic. The Atlantic also has a damning article on how Vogue tried to stand by the story. This is more than Radical Chic. It’s Fascist Chic!
Roger goes on to describe Vogue’s fascist chic as “horrifying and disgusting” — but in a sense, it’s simply the distaff equivalent of Thomas Friedman’s Chicom worship at the New York Times, which itself is merely the latest iteration of the paper’s 80 year old love for Big Brother.
“No copy of Vogue is going to darken our house again,” Roger adds. “How about yours?”
Not much risk here, but I did watch The September Issue last year, the documentary about Vogue, circa 2007 AW (After Wintour), and wrote it up at the PJ Lifestyle blog. For a whole host of reasons, it really did feel like the publishing industry equivalent of Titanic or The Last Days of Pompeii.
If Anna Wintour is looking for a Mideast equivalent of Evita Peron, that’s not exactly a shock based on how she comes across in her own documentary.
Obama strongly defended his plans to make America a leader in new energy sources like biofuels, and wind power and solar power, and rebuked Republicans for opposing his plans to cut subsidies to profit cranking oil producers.
“If some of these folks were around when Columbus set sail … they would not have believed that the world was round,” he said, at a Community College in the Maryland suburbs outside Washington DC.
Wait, you mean he’s actually trying this line as an attack on the side of the aisle that doesn’t get the vapors every Columbus Day? Or as its now known in the academia that shaped Obama’s punitive worldview, Native American Genocide Remembrance Day.
Given the Black Armband revisionist history that most of his mentors (Wright, Ayers, Derrick Bell, etc.) have deeply embraced, I’d love to see Obama’s reaction if a journalist asked him, “Mr. President, given the great leaps forward in technology, science and health the West has made as a result, do you think that Christopher Columbus discovering America was ultimately an unalloyed good thing?”
And as JWF notes, even the Obama boosters at the leftwing Talking Points Memo site are, for once, howling at the gaffes in The One’s latest speech. How often do you see a headline like this at TPM? “Obama Mangles U.S., World History In Energy Speech:”
In mocking the GOP, Obama cited an anecdote about [President Rutherford B. Hayes] in which, upon using the telephone for the first time, he said, “It’s a great invention, but who would ever want to use one?”
“That’s why he’s not on Mount Rushmore,” Obama said. “He’s explaining why we can’t do something instead of why we can do something.”
But Nan Card, curator of manuscripts at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Ohio, told TPM that the nation’s 19th president was being unfairly tagged as a Luddite.
“He really was the opposite,” she said. “He had the first telephone in the White House. He also had the first typewriter in the White House. Thomas Edison came to the White House as well and displayed the phonograph. Photographing people who came to the White House and visited at dinners and receptions was also very important to him.”
While often cited, Card said Obama’s cited quote had never been confirmed by contemporary sources and is likely apocryphal. A contemporary newspaper account of his first experience with telephone in 1877 from the Providence Journal records a smiling Hayes repeatedly responding to the voice on the other line with the phrase, “That is wonderful.” You can read the full story here.
“He was pretty technology-oriented for the time,” Card said. “Between the telephone, the telegraph, the phonograph and photography, I think he was pretty much on the cutting edge.”
As for why he’s not on Mt. Rushmore, Card noted that popular history tends to favor wartime presidents in the long run.
Obama’s invocation of the “flat earth” theory in the context of Christopher Columbus’ journey across the ocean also contained some dubious (if incredibly widespread) history.
“If some of these folks were around when Columbus set sail, they must have been founding members of the Flat Earth Society,” Obama said. “They would not have believed that the world was round.”
In fact, historians have long contended that the notion Europeans widely believed the Earth was flat, let alone 15th century Spanish scholars, is a myth developed centuries later.
Oh sure, next you’re going to tell me that John Kerry was lying about Thomas Jefferson and that whole “dissent is patriotic” shtick.
You sort of wish somebody could fire a silver bullet into all of this revisionist history — which brings us to Ed Morrissey, who links to a video from the RNC which tracks how the prices of gas rises whenever Obama deploys one of his worst rhetorical tics:
As Ed jokes, a few more Silver Bullet references, “and Bob Seger and Coors may have a case for trademark violation.”
Finally, at Commentary, Ted R. Bromund’s reaction to Obama’s latest gaseous rhetoric is to joke, “Who Writes This Stuff?”
Look – writing welcoming remarks must be a tedious job, and I wouldn’t like to do it for anything. But would it be too much to ask that his speechwriters avoid obvious solecisms? If you’re going to use the tired “the British burned the White House” joke, don’t follow it up, two paragraphs later, with the claim that “through the grand sweep of history, through all its twists and turns, there is one constant – the rock-solid alliance between the United States and the United Kingdom.” So, except for the whole burning thing, it’s a constant?
No one is a more enthusiastic supporter of the Anglo-American alliance than I am, and I mean that literally. But it’s just not true that the alliance is a constant. It reflects, yes, shared interests, but it was also made, with considerable effort and by taking real political risks, by leaders like Churchill. That was the point of the speech at Fulton – not to celebrate the war-time alliance, but to make the case for its continuance in the nascent Cold War.
But when Obama says that “the relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom is the strongest that it has ever been,” just after his administration has announced a “strategic pivot” to Asia and refused to back Britain over the Falklands, he’s not taking any risks, or making any effort, for the alliance at all. He’s just talking. And truly great speakers, like Churchill, don’t believe that assertions can substitute for arguments or actions.
From the White House, the bust went to the home of the British ambassador in Washington. An experienced Washington hand tells the following story: One night after dinner, the ambassador and an American visitor were looking at the bust. The Ambassador remarked to his visitor, “We are keeping it here for the time being, trusting that your next president, whoever he is, will want it back.”
As Troy Senik writes at Ricochet, “The Special Relationship … in Storage,” which metaphorically sums up our current relations with England — and many of our former allies perfectly. This November, you can help ensure that it’s taken out of mothballs for 2013.
Back in 1999, long before Roger Ebert transformed himself from an insightful middlebrow movie critic to a wannabe pundit terrified that the Red (State) Scare would sap and impurify his precious bodily fluids, he made a great observation about Norma Desmond, Gloria Swanson’s Sunset Boulevard character:
Norma of course is not a wrinkled crone. She is only 50 in the film, younger than stars such as Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve. There is a scene during Norma’s beauty makeover when a magnifying glass is held in front of her eyes, and we are startled by how smooth Swanson’s skin is. Swanson in real life was a health nut who fled from the sun, which no doubt protected her skin (she was 53 when she made the film), but the point in “Sunset Boulevard” is that she has aged not in the flesh but in the mind; she has become fixed at the moment of her greatness, and lives in the past.
Trapped in your own Glory Days, as Bruce Springsteen would say. Which brings us to John Boot’s review of Wrecking Ball, Springsteen’s new album at the PJ Lifestyle blog, which thanks to Boot’s great writing and an Instalanche, is well over 130 comments and climbing.
Springsteen is a decade older than Swanson in Sunset Boulevard; he’s a physically youthful-looking age 62, but like Norma Desmond, he’s desperate to stay relevant in a young person’s game:
On the most incendiary song on Wrecking Ball, “Death to My Hometown,” whose title sounds like some sort of al-Qaeda parody of eighties-era Springsteen, the Boss ventures even further. The song sounds like a traditional Irish fighting anthem, and he apparently feels that the old-timey feel gives him cover to say exactly what he’s thinking about how bankers — “vultures,” “marauders,” “greedy thieves” and flesh-eaters — allegedly came to town and ruined everything:
No cannonball did fly
nor rifles cut us down
no bombs fell from the sky
no blood soaked the ground
…but just as sure as the hand o’ God
they brought death to my hometown
…they destroyed our families’ factories
and they took our homes
they left our bodies
on the plains
the vultures picked our bones…
At this point Springsteen urges his audience to shoot the evildoers.
So listen up my sonny boy
be ready when they come
for they’ll be returning
sure as the rising sun
…send the robber barons straight to hell
To make it clear how the robber barons should be sent to hell, the song climaxes with the sound of a rifle or shotgun being cocked and fired.
Springsteen’s meaning couldn’t be clearer, and though he will no doubt claim that his words aren’t meant to be taken literally, he has millions of devoted followers hanging on his every word. How would he feel if someone acted on his bloodthirsty directives? At the very least, Springsteen should apologize, recall the album, and edit out the sound of the gunfire, and maybe the line “If I had me a gun, I’d find the bastards and shoot ‘em on sight” as well.
No conservative or Republican entertainer could escape outrage and condemnation after issuing such a naked appeal to kill anyone by whom they feel victimized, and Springsteen should know that shooting bankers isn’t the solution to the failed promise of the Obama presidency.
I’ve never bought his “working man” schtick, and his mot recent “big” songs have been lazy three-note drone-fests (Philadelphia, Secret Garden). Now the botoxed, hair-weaved, fake “everyman” who summers in the Hamptons (where his children showcase their equestrianism) is writing some pretty irresponsible lyrics that appear to advocate violence against the fatcats and bankers with whom he rubs elbows while munching arugula at the Classic.
Maybe he’s looking to be the new Che shirt. He was ever a phony and is a phony still.
Actually, at the start of Springsteen’s career, he wasn’t a phony — and he was making some of his best music. But back in the mid-’70s, Jon Landau, a former Rolling Stone critic who quickly hitched his wagon to Springsteen’s hemi-powered drone, transformed it into an inert hybrid family sedan, stuck in the mud of a history that never existed. (No wonder Springsteen is yet another weirdly nostalgic “progressive.”) Back in 2005, in a rare insightful piece in Slate titled “Faux Americana,” (whose metatag reads “Bruce Springsteen, Bullsh**er”) Stephen Metcalf noted that Springsteen, who made brilliantly accessible music at the start of his career with albums like The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle and Born to Run, was transformed into something unrecognizable by Landau:
By 1978, and the release of Darkness on the Edge of Town, the endearing Jersey wharf rat in Springsteen had been refined away. In its place was a majestic American simpleton with a generic heartland twang, obsessed with cars, Mary, the Man, and the bitterness between fathers and sons. Springsteen has been augmenting and refining that persona for so long now that it’s hard to recall its status, not only as an invention, but an invention whose origin wasn’t even Bruce Springsteen. For all the po-faced mythic resonance that now accompanies Bruce’s every move, we can thank Jon Landau, the ex-Rolling Stonecritic who, after catching a typically seismic Springsteen set in 1974, famously wrote, “I saw rock and roll future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen.”
Well, Bruce Springsteen was Jon Landau’s future. Over the next couple of years, Landau insinuated himself into Bruce’s artistic life and consciousness (while remaining on the Rolling Stone masthead) until he became Springsteen’s producer, manager, and full-service Svengali. Unlike the down-on-their-luck Springsteens of Freehold, N.J., Landau hailed from the well-appointed suburbs of Boston and had earned an honors degree in history from Brandeis. He filled his new protégé’s head with an American Studies syllabus heavy on John Ford, Steinbeck, and Flannery O’Connor. At the same time that he intellectualized Bruce, he anti-intellectualized him. Rock music was transcendent, Landau believed, because it was primitive, not because it could be avant-garde. The White Album and Hendrix and the Velvet Underground had robbed rock of its power, which lay buried in the pre-Beatles era with Del Shannon and the Ronettes. Bruce’s musical vocabulary accordingly shrank. By Darkness on the Edge of Town, gone were the West Side Story-esque jazz suites of The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle. In their place were tight, guitar-driven intro-verse-chorus-verse-bridge-chorus songs. Springsteen’s image similarly transformed. On the cover of Darkness, he looks strangely like the sallower cousin of Pacino’s Sonny Wortzik, the already quite sallow anti-hero of Dog Day Afternoon. The message was clear: Springsteen himself was one of the unbeautiful losers, flitting along the ghostly fringes of suburban respectability.
Thirty years later, and largely thanks to Landau, Springsteen is no longer a musician. He’s a belief system. And, like any belief system worth its salt, he brooks no in-between. You’re either in or you’re out. This has solidified Bruce’s standing with his base, for whom he remains a god of total rock authenticity. But it’s killed him with everyone else. To a legion of devout nonbelievers—they’re not saying Bruuuce, they’re booing—Bruce is more a phenomenon akin to Dianetics or Tinkerbell than “the new Dylan,” as the Columbia Records promotions machine once hyped him. And so we’ve reached a strange juncture. About America’s last rock star, it’s either Pentecostal enthusiasm or total disdain.
But hey, when it’s an election year, the DNC knows who to call. Forget corporate rock — Springsteen is the ultimate Corporatist Rocker. Or as I wrote in 2008, to borrow from the vernacular of The Boss’s early ’70s glory days (to coin a phrase), has any musician become more Establishment than Springsteen?
“If you’re less curious about who mentored Obama than you are about how Sarah Palin maintains a year-round tan in Alaska, you might be a liberal,” Jim Treacher writes at the Daily Caller. “Or a member of the media (PTR).”
Drip…drip..drip…
As with the ACORN videos, what’s on the videos sometimes isn’t as much fun as the media’s hysterical response to them. Regarding those earlier videos, as Jonah Goldberg wrote last week in his eulogy to Breitbart:
When liberals called him (or his heroes) racist, Andrew paid them the compliment of taking them seriously. He truly felt that to call someone a racist was as profound an insult as could be leveled. To do so without evidence or logic was a sin.
He believed, rightly, that much of establishment liberalism hurls such charges as a way to bully opponents into silence, and he would not be bullied. That was why, for instance, he offered a reward of $100,000 (payable to the United Negro College Fund) to anybody who could prove tea partiers hurled racial epithets over and over at black congressmen walking past them to vote on Obamacare, as several alleged. No one got paid because the charge — recycled over and over by the media — was a lie.
The Internet was a boon to Andrew because it exposed liberalism’s undeserved monopoly on the “narrative” — one of his favorite words.
60 Minutes won awards for hidden cameras, but when he used the same technique to embarrass liberals, such tactics were suddenly proclaimed ethically beyond the pale. The joke was on the scolds because they had to cover the stories anyway. And the stories got results. Congress defunded ACORN. Heads rolled at NPR. Andrew understood that news and arguments change politics if you can get the news and arguments to the people — and if you don’t let those who don’t like what you say define you.
Whatever his faults, that was my friend’s great and remarkable strength: He never let the bastards get him down. That took away his enemies’ greatest power, and they hated him all the more for it.
Soledad O’Brien and her CNN panel manage to stumble into Contessa Brewer territory in this appearance by attempting to paint Breitbart.com editor-in-chief Joel Pollak as a racist for making a point about Barack Obama’s support for a proponent of “critical race theory” during his days at Harvard Law School. Joel ends up in an argument with a woefully unprepared O’Brien on the theory itself, but the actual facepalm moment goes to one of her panelists, who asks Joel why he’s so afraid of black people:
Only one problem, as Bryan Preston writes at the Tatler. “Joel Pollak’s wife is black. She’s from South Africa, actually, and her mother was a political appointee of none other than Nelson Mandela. Here she is, in video made when Pollak ran for Congress.”
I realize when you’re the farm team for Fox and MSNBC, you might be short-staffed, but whose idea was it to send Soledad O’Brien out to attack yesterday’s clip from Breitbart.com? As we saw last night when I pulled the Wright-Free Zone clip out of mothballs, O’Brien declared Wright’s speech to the NAACP “a home run” on CNN in 2008, and was given a personal shout-out in that speech by Wright himself.
But at least O’Brien has been an on-air newsreader for many years; as I’ve mentioned before, I used to enjoy her work during the early days of MSNBC, back when it was more Tech-TV, and less Air America with video. The bigger question is, whose idea was it to send Jay Thomas, last seen playing Eddie LeBec on Cheers, to pull the race card on Pollak? He may have just scored the only double-own goal in NHL history. Beyond his direct racialist assault on Pollak, as Jeff Goldstein writes at Protein Wisdom:
And as an aside, here’s a note to Jay Thomas: in your attempt to marginalize Whites who don’t engage in knee jerk paternalistic defenses of Black academics, you are in fact presuming to speak for those Black academics and take ownership of what it is they believed in order to try to protect them from the scrutiny they themselves invited by the very fact of their works and theoretics.
That is to say, by trying to diminish scrutiny of their scholarship, you are treating them as a plantation owner might the chattel he wishes to protect.
Which I’m sure has never even occurred to you, so convinced are you of your own rote liberal rectitude.
It goes beyond the soft bigotry of low expectations; it is the overt bigotry of the falsely pious. And the times, they are a-changin’…
Last word to Capt. Ed:
Frankly, it’s clear that no one at CNN does critical thinking, on race theory or anything else. The point of Andrew’s final project isn’t so much to make Obama’s early radical ties clear; it’s to point out how the media tried to keep them quiet. This uninformed attack from O’Brien and most of the CNN panel is a great demonstration of the very point that Andrew wanted to make with these videos. All they needed to say — and what Holmes tried to say at one point — is that plenty of people toy with radicalism in college, but drop those passions when they get into the real world, and that college activism isn’t terribly germane twenty years later with a term as President already in place. They fell into the trap set by Andrew and Joel, and somewhere Andrew is enjoying a mighty laugh over it.
I suspect he’ll be enjoying a few more before the year is done.
“Open your hearts and open your minds to the words of Prof. Derrick Bell.” Those are the words of Barack Obama in reference to the controversial racialist Derrick Bell. Prof. Charles Ogletree, Barack Obama’s mentor said “We hid this throughout the 2008 campaign.” As more is uncovered about Prof. Derrick Bell and his radical views, it will become clear why Prof. Ogletree wanted this video hidden.
And a CNN reporter even had the chutzpah to write nearly a month after the election, “The Americans who are comparing him to those remarkable predecessors are putting a lot of faith in a man they barely know.” Who’s fault is that, champ?
Consider the ”Space Traders” story. How does one have a meaningful dialogue with Derrick Bell? Because his thesis is utterly untestable, one quickly reaches a dead end after either accepting or rejecting his assertion that white Americans would cheerfully sell all blacks to the aliens. The story is also a poke in the eye of American Jews, particularly those who risked life and limb by actively participating in the civil rights protests of the 1960′s. Bell clearly implies that this was done out of tawdry self-interest. Perhaps most galling is Bell’s insensitivity in making the symbol of Jewish hypocrisy the little girl who perished in the Holocaust — as close to a saint as Jews have. A Jewish professor who invoked the name of Rosa Parks so derisively would be bitterly condemned — and rightly so.
And as the “ho-hum, this is old news” response begins from the MSM, just a reminder, drip…drip…drip…drip.…
Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds updates the Obamacon avatar for the 2012 campaign. As he writes, ” If Obama’s going to spread the hate — which, given the close White House / Media Matters coordination that the Daily Caller uncovered, is what he’s doing — then he needs to take responsibility for the hatemongering that has already resulted in Limbaugh’s getting death threats. Hope is what he promised. Hate is what he’s delivering.”
Update: Who is Charles Ogletree? Googling his name quickly sends one down the rabbit hole. In 2009, New Zealand journalist Trevor Loudon claimed that during the early 1970s, Ogletree edited his university’s Black Panthers newspaper. Last August, when Obama attended a cocktail party at Ogletree’s house on Martha’s Vineyard, Pat Dollard wrote that Ogletree “is also the lawyer of Henry Louis Gates, the racist Harvard professor who’s racism caused the beer summit. Ogletree’s daughter Rashida was recently hired into Holder’s Justice Department as a lawyer. Ogletree is still a militant leftist and is still called on by the Obamas for advice.”
Related: “I reject this idea that we should just shrug our shoulders and buy the PBS/Buzzfeed line that there’s nothing new here. Stop it! This is news! They didn’t want to talk about it then and they don’t want to talk about it now.” Michelle Malkin punches back twice as hard, as Mr. Obama would say, against Juan Williams. “This is all about Alinskyite control of who tells the story. Well guess what Barack Obama and Jim Messina. It is not all your monopoly anymore and that’s why they are pushing back so hard.”
Yesterday, Mitt Romney said he’s “not going to say outrageous things about the president.” Trouble with that statement is that “outrageous” is a pretty subjective adjective. Outrageous to whom? Apparently, Romney meant to say he’s not going to say anything about the president that would outrage the left — because he doesn’t seem to be afraid to say something about the president that would outrage the right. In fact, he did just that earlier today, when he essentially said the president shouldn’t be held responsible for the high price of gas.
“I think people recognize that the president can’t precisely set the price at the pump,” Romney said in an interview on CNBC.
Oh, Romney, you’re right technically — but don’t you realize that precisely setting the price at the pump is also precisely what Obama longs to do? He wants to set the price of gas not so as to alleviate the burden on American consumers but so as to make his favored forms of energy more economically appealing to them.
Rich, you have nailed it re the necessity of defeating Barack Obama this fall. But how to do it? Despite Romney’s wins yesterday, there’s still a so-what air about his candidacy; he’s like one of those seat-warmers at the Oscars who slips into the vacancies so as to give the continuing illusion of a packed house. He’s a passionless candidate with a passionless following at a time that positively demands passion in order to counter the great Axelrod Media Machine, the wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic party and its functioning propaganda arm.
And as a reward for laying off on Obama on an NBC spin-off network, he’s attacked by a sneering Tom Brokaw — the elder statesman of NBC and champion of “objective journalism” — over at another NBC spin-off network, MSNBC, where General Electric’s spokesmen feel they can safely go and let their hair (or toupees) down and display their biases for all to see, far away from the dwindling pool of elderly viewers who still watch parent NBC’s news shows.
Liberal MSNBC host Christ Matthews, who has spent the last several days berating Rush Limbaugh for using inappropriate words, on Wednesday mocked the young crowds at Mitt Romney’s rallies, comparing them to brainwashed “North Korean” “zombies.”
Talking to fellow MSNBC journalist Chuck Todd, Matthews spewed, “…Who are these featureless young people waving those placards? I mean, are they, are they androids?… They are all exactly in unison. Is this North Korea? Who are these people?”
Finally, Clarice Feldman asks at the Tatler, “Where Are Andrea Mitchell, Brian Williams and Tom Brokaw’s Apologies for Their Colleagues’ Misogynistic Rants?”
Umm… checking watching…checking… OK, how ’bout, never? Spotting RFK Jr. smearing Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) as a “call girl” for Big Oil, Glenn Reynolds responds, writes that the rules of the game are simple and easy to understand: “Call Republicans whatever you want, then go all have you no decency??? if Republicans dare return the favor.”
It was just a few days ago that General Motors announced it was killing the Chevy Volt. The King Was Dead. Well, long live the European King: today, the Geneva Auto Show named the Volt its 2012 Car of the Year. The Auto Show said that the car was a “mature product … the first example of an electric vehicle with extended range.”
Here are the facts about the Chevy Volt. According to Chevrolet, “Volt is unique among electric vehicles because you have two sources of energy.” You can even drive “an EPA-estimated 35 miles” without gas! Which means you can hit the 7-11, Whole Foods, and pot dispensary in one trip before having to recharge for three hours. About a month ago, those vaunted batteries jolted the Volt, necessitating the call back of 8,000 Volts sold in the U.S. Why? It turns out that after crash tests done by federal safety regulators, the batteries burst into flame.
As Samuel Gregg writes at the American Spectator, obsessions with radical environmentalism and crony corporatism (is there any other kind?) are but two of the facets of “The American Left’s European Nightmare:”
Then there are the pointed criticisms of the European model expressed in a recently released World Bank report. Outside the parallel universe inhabited by Occupy Wall Street and assorted fellow-travelers, few would accuse the World Bank of harboring many radical free marketers, let alone the “neoliberal” bogeymen regularly conjured up by European politicians.
Among other things, the report refers to weak work incentives, anemic entrepreneurship levels, feeble venture-capital markets, over-regulated service sectors, European businesses choosing to stay small to avoid compulsory unionization and extra red-tape, labor markets crippled by powerful restrictions on companies’ ability to dismiss employees, research and development steadily falling further behind America, and on-going declines in annual work hours. The report also notes that Europe, with just 10 percent of the world’s population, accounts for an astonishing 58 percent of the entire world economy’s spending on social protection.
Such is the long-term economic price associated with what amounts to many Europeans’ near-obsession with securing economic security and equality through state action. It also has made a continent that once literally ruled most of the world into a textbook example of the basic un-workability of the Social Democratic dream.
Hence, it’s little wonder that Krugman and others dismiss those who warn of disturbing parallels between Europe and America as having “no idea what they’re talking about.” The purpose of such remarks is to shut down discussion — just one of American liberalism’s many illiberal traits — in the face of awkward truths and facts.
In a way, we’re been here before. Prior to Communism’s defeat in Eastern Europe and the former USSR, many American liberals were in denial about the performance of command economies. Another Nobel Laureate, the late Paul Samuelson, argued in the thirteenth edition of his renowned textbook Economics, that “the Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and thrive.” Providentially, this edition was published in the year, ahem, 1989.
Such tragically mistimed observations, however, reflected decades of ignoring the realities of life in command economies. In the tenth edition of Economics (1976), for example, Samuelson claimed: “It is a vulgar mistake to think that most people in Eastern Europe are miserable.”
Vulgar? A mistake? Well, I guess all those secret police, informers, “re-education facilities,” barbed-wires, and Soviet troop concentrations in the “workers-paradises” were just there for decorative purposes.
In the real world, of course, there are genuine arguments for us to have about what Europe’s present drama means for America. Even some of Krugman’s New York Times‘ colleagues have engaged such questions, albeit rather tentatively.
…And some haven’t, as Clay Waters writes at Newsbusters. “NYT Mag Writer Delights in ‘Dizzy Exuberance’ of London Rioters: Promotes Socialism, Annoying Subway Riders,” in a piece that sounds like something out of an underground alternative rag from the ’70s:
Novelist (and Socialist Workers Party member) China Mieville wrote the main essay for the London issue of the New York Times Sunday Magazine, “‘Oh London, You Drama Queen.’” According to him, London is a mess of racism and youth alienation, and only free public housing and celebration of loud music on the tube will save it. He also excused last summer’s burning and rioting, motivated by a “deep sense of injustice”: “Youths taking TVs, clothes, carpets, food from broken-open shops, sometimes with dizzy exuberance, sometimes with what looked like thoughtful care.”
Even the photo captions are replete with leftist smuggery, contrasting an old-fashioned butcher with a bleak-looking dance club: “Smithfield Market, in Central London, is rooted in the past./The scene at Plastic People, a club in Hackney, looks to the future.”
I wonder what American retailers who pay for to advertise in the very expensive real estate in the Sunday Times magazine think about its writers’ cavalier attitudes towards shoplifting and looting?
Incidentally, the Times article and its author’s love of euro-squalor dovetails well with an observation James Lileks recently made about the mid-’60s François Truffaut version of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. “Here’s what I find interesting: whenever the sci-fi movies of the 60s and 70s wanted to set something in a horrible totalitarian world, they just shot on location at a government housing project.”
Who looks after society as a whole? Our political leaders are supposed to, but things don’t always work out that way. As P.J. O’Rourke comments: “When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.”That’s right, and one finds members of both parties on the take. The more powerful the government, the more tempting it is to purchase influence — and, in fact, if your competitors are buying influence, you’ll have to respond in kind in self-defense.
And when everyone responds that way, the burdens on innovation, new business formation, and wealth generation keep growing.
Several decades ago, science fiction writer Robert Heinlein observed: “Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances, which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all Right-thinking people.
Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as ‘bad luck.’ ”
Will our “luck” turn good or bad over the next few years? A lot depends on what happens in November, and after. Especially after.
During the McGovern-Mondale era, the Democrats were exactly where the Republicans are now: the party had been taken over by its most extreme liberal faction, and it had lost touch with the core concerns of the middle class….Those terrible losses in 1972 and, especially, in 1984 were the Democrats’ shock therapy.
What happened in the interim? In effect, moderate Democrats wrested the party back from its most liberal wing….“We had become a party that had stopped worrying about people who were working and only focused on people who weren’t working,” [Al] From told me. “The party didn’t understand how big a concern crime was. It had stopped talking about opportunity and growth.”
As one of Power Line’s readers chortles:
Wait…WTF??? NOW they’re telling us this? (While conveniently leaving out the Dukakis disaster…”competence, not ideology.”) What did they say THEN? Weren’t they actively denying these claims about Democrats, at the time? Weren’t they relentlessly attacking conservatives and Republicans with every weapon at hand precisely to deny that these issues were shortcomings of the Dems and the left? Indeed, were there not many voices heard even at the Times–THEN–denouncing conservatives for even raising these issues on the usual grounds of heartlessness, racism and venality?
Let’s go through what Nocera wrote, which is a piñata of humor; any way you swing at it, comedy treats emerge. First up, at Power Line, Hinderaker answers his reader’s question, “What did they say then?” and goes through the Times’ archives to find the expected glowing sales pitches for McGovern, Mondale and Dukakis, during the very era when the New York Times itself “had been taken over by its most extreme liberal faction, and it had lost touch with the core concerns of the middle class,” as its columnist writes. Just read William McGowan’s recent book Gray Lady Down for example after example of how accurate that was.
But let’s go back to Nocera’s quote once again:
During the McGovern-Mondale era, the Democrats were exactly where the Republicans are now: the party had been taken over by its most extreme liberal faction, and it had lost touch with the core concerns of the middle class.
I doubt if I’d call Dubya, Mitt Romney or John Boehner the GOP’s “most extreme liberal faction,” though certainly both Bush #41 and #43 often found themselves in trouble when they decided to work with the same Democrats that Nocera is decrying. Bush #41 was talked into caving on “No New Taxes,” his one campaign promise, which both brought on the recession of 1990, and was later demagogued against him by the same Democratic Party who initially welcomed the notion. It was a classic case of Animal House’s “You f***ed up – you trusted us” motto in action.
Similarly, Bush #43 certainly welcomed every opportunity to work across the aisle, whether it was Ted Kennedy and “No Child Left Behind,” bringing in Underperformin’ Norman Mineta as a cabinet official, or reaching out to Joe Lieberman. Just as with Bush #41 and taxes, Regime Change in Iraq was a carryover from the lip service at least of Al Gore, as well as Bill Clinton, and Madeleine Albright. And there wasn’t anything conservative about TARP, as savvy conservatives wrote at the time. Certainly Romney having brought socialized medicine to Massachusetts does little for his conservative bona fides, but in the Obama era, that doesn’t quite make him a member of either party’s “most extreme liberal faction.” Similarly, while Boehner’s waffling during the debt crisis did nothing to reduce the Debt Star explosion to come, he can’t be blamed for the runaway entitlement state and spending, which began under FDR and was super-duper-mega-sized by Mr. Obama.
Found via Commentary, Jewish Ideas Daily explores the notion of “Gertrude Stein, Fascist?” The article begins with an image of Picasso’s portrait of Stein from the start of the 20th century and a quote from him. “Everybody thinks she is not at all like her portrait. But never mind, in the end she will manage to look just like it”:
This discrepancy between the imaginary Stein and the private Stein is, in a sense, the true subject of Barbara Will’s recent Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma. Will’s book, the latest and most thorough investigation (and this is very much a detective story) of Stein’s political ideology, is extremely detailed and erudite, and brings to public attention what had previously been hidden in scholarly journals: Stein’s wartime translations of the speeches of Marshal Philippe Pétain, head of France’s Vichy regime, with a highly sympathetic introduction that compares Pétain to George Washington.
Will combs Stein’s archives for clues about her “collaboration”—what it constituted, whether it was genuine—and comes away convinced that Stein is guilty of “commitment” to Pétain. But, as often as not, the evidence points to a fundamental murkiness. No matter how much the archive appears to answer and expose, questions always remain, and we frequently cannot say what Stein intended. What appears to be unassailable evidence of collaboration can just as easily be unassailable evidence of Stein’s survival instinct. Perhaps there is no difference.
Consider the Pétain documents themselves. What can we actually say about them? The book was never published, the translations were shoddy, and there are hints in Wars I Have Seen that she abandoned Pétainism. (Her Pétainism was originally genuine.) But Stein was also a Jewish woman (as was Toklas) whose life depended on the protection of Vichy officials, and there is the very real possibility that Stein’s self-styled role as Vichy propagandist was a fiction necessary for survival. Or it is at least an embellishment. Reading this way, we enter a second murkiness of morality, and approach the question of when self-preservation becomes outright collaboration. It is not a comfortable place.
In order to make sense of the Pétain documents, Will scrutinizes almost every shred of Stein’s writing, from articles, essays, and novels to private letters and notes, and reads them for what they might say about Stein’s actions. As Will writes, “It would be a mistake to simply dissociate Stein’s early ‘progressive’ experimental writing from her later ‘reactionary’ politics to excuse or compartmentalize. The tendencies that drew Stein toward both Bernard Faÿ and Philippe Pétain, we could say, were always there.”
Wow, a modernist artist in bed with the Nazis or their collaborators. That’s never happened before! (Or not, as we’ll explore on the next page.)
Democrats running for Congress are moving quickly to use the most recent surge in oil and gasoline prices to bash Republicans over energy policy, and more broadly, the direction of the country.
With oil prices hitting a high this week and prices at the pump topping $3 a gallon in many places, Amy Klobuchar, a Democratic Senate candidate in Minnesota, is making the issue the centerpiece of her campaign. Ms. Klobuchar says it “is one of the first things people bring up” at her campaign stops.
To varying degrees, Democrats around the country are following a similar script that touches on economic anxiety and populist resentment against oil companies.
President Obama and his Democratic allies have responded to rising gas prices by insisting there is little, if anything, the administration can do to bring them down.
Obama told students in Miami on Thursday that there is “no silver bullet” when it comes to lowering gas prices. The White House press secretary told reporters this week there are no “magic solutions.”
But Democrats haven’t always been so consistent in their message. In fact, one prominent Democrat argued in 2005 that President Bush and Republicans were directly to blame for high gas prices.
Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D., Fla.), then a freshman member of Congress, complained on the House floor about the prospect of paying “more than three dollars a gallon” for gas “for the foreseeable future, if not forever.”
Based on the current prices here in California, three dollars a gallon is looking pretty good right now.
Next, ABC gets all wee-wee-ed up, as President Obama would say, over Newt Gingrich having a bit of sport with Mr. Obama’s algae obsessions:
On Thursday night, Gingrich mocked the president’s speech in front of an Idaho crowd, by suggesting that he should take a bottle of algae with him and “go around and we can have the Obama solution.”
“And maybe what we ought to do at Newt.org is we ought to get t-shirts that say ‘You choose.’ Gingrich went on to suggest the slogans, ‘You have Newt: Drill here, Drill Now, Pay Less. You have Obama: Have Algae, Pay More, Be Weird.”
As gas nears $5-a-gallon out west, the president, who has cancelled a key pipeline and frozen federal leases from Alaska to the East Coast, teaches us about American algae potential, in the way he used to emphasize the importance of tire pressure and “tune-ups.” He castigates the opposition for making political hay out of bad news, in the way he routinely did as a senator in compiling the most partisan voting record in the Senate. Energy Secretary Chu cannot and will not say a word about soaring gas prices, since he is on record not so long ago hoping that they might double — that is, get to $8- to 10-a-gallon as they are in Europe. The Energy Department can do almost everything Americans don’t want, but not the single thing they do want.
Jennifer Granholm, the Democrat former governor of Michigan from 2003 through the end of 2010, now hiding out in the witness protection program that is Al Gore’s Current TV, claims that “blaming the president for high gas prices is like blaming Rudy Giuliani for 9/11.” A curious turn of the phrase considering that both President Obama’s former “Green” “Jobs” “Czar” and 35 percent of Granholm’s fellow Democrats likely happen to blame Giuliani for 9/11. And even more curious, as Noel Sheppard writes at Newsbusters, because Granholm regularly attacked President Bush over high gas prices — and stumped for Obama’s energy policy, which promised rising gas prices and bankrupting the coal industry.
Returning to the theme of an earlier post on the supposed stupidity of the electorate in the eyes of the media, I notice that today’s Washington Posthas President Obama telling us that there are “no quick fixes” for high gas prices. Likewise “no silver bullet.” It is now ten years since the Senate rejected the request of President Bush and the House of Representatives to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, at least partly on the grounds that, so we were told at the time, it would take ten years for the oil to come on line. So, then. How about a slow fix? How about any fix? The “no quick fix” meme is both true and irrelevant, yet another of the straw men that the rhetorical President is so skilled at building up only to tear down.This is just how he chooses to tell us, in the words of the Post’s helpful gloss that it is “the White House’s belief that gasoline prices are subject to cyclical spikes due to forces largely outside its control, including the rise in Chinese and Indian oil demand.”
Of course, that is itself a straw-man argument. The fact that oil price rises are partly or even “largely” outside our control makes no case at all for inaction on those things that are in our control.The Post, like the President, must think we’re stupid. Indeed, according to the account of the same speech in Politicothe latter thinks we are so stupid that we will believe him when he tells us that it is the advocates of drilling who think we are stupid. “The American people aren’t stupid,” he said, because they will understand that Republican pleas to drill for more domestic oil are “a bumper sticker” and “not a strategy to solve our energy challenges.” As David Burge’s iowahawk pointed out in a Tweet, that’s a bit rich coming from the guy who got himself elected on the bumper-sticker slogan of “hope and change.” At least “drill, baby, drill” has a precise and well-understood meaning.
Certainly, Republicans have every right to use the Democrats’ tactics from 2008 against them; jujitsu is what political warfare is all about. Though at Big Journalism, Warner Todd Huston outlines “How Obama Uses False Media Narratives To Advance His Polices.”
At the turn of the twentieth century, President Theodore Roosevelt became embroiled in a public controversy over how some writers and naturalists described the natural world in overly anthropomorphic and sentimental terms. In a 1907 article attacking Jack London, among other writers, Roosevelt popularized the moniker “nature fakers,” those writers whom Roosevelt called “an object of derision to every scientist worthy of the name, to every real lover of the wilderness, to every faunal naturalist, to every true hunter or nature lover. But it is evident that [the nature faker] completely deceives many good people who are wholly ignorant of wild life.”
The “nature” the sentimentalists described was not the real nature, but one conjured from old myths and imaginative projections of human ideals onto an inhuman natural world. Unfortunately, a century later “nature fakers” are still promoting their sentimental myths about nature, only now with serious repercussions for our national interests and security.
These days “nature fakery” lives on in school curricula and popular culture, from Earth Day celebrations to Disney cartoons like Pocahontas. Only now this myth is renamed “environmentalism” and disguised with a patina of scientific authority. Worse yet, this allegedly scientific information provides the basis for government policies that impact our economic productivity and national security. The furor over global warming illustrates this unholy alliance of ancient myth and misleading science. For years we have heard claims that the evidence for global warming caused by human-generated “greenhouse gas” is “incontrovertible,” as the American Physical Society claimed last year in a policy statement, and that “if no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur.”
In a recent column titled “The High Priests of Eco-Destruction,” Michelle Malkin writes that the nature fakers themselves aren’t opposed to causing their own significant disruptions to man’s physical and ecological systems:
Despite repeated judicial slaps for their “determined disregard” for the law, the Obama administration continues to suppress documents related to that junk science scandal. Last month, House Republicans threatened to subpoena the Interior Department for information. Call it a greenwash.
—Water wars and the Delta smelt. The infamous, endangered three-inch fish and its environmental protectors continue to jeopardize the water supply of more than 25 million Californians. Federal restrictions have cut off some 81 billion gallons of water to farmers and consumers in Central and Southern California. Previous courts have ruled that the federal biological opinions used to justify the water cutoff were invalid and illegal. Last September, the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of California admonished two federal scientists for acting in “bad faith.” The judge’s blistering rebuke of the Obama administration scientists concluded that their slanted testimony about the delta smelt was “an attempt to mislead and to deceive the Court into accepting what is not only not the best science, it’s not science.”
GOP Rep. Devin Nunes, who represents the hard-hit San Joaquin Valley area, noted that Salazar recently “doubled down on the illegal policies of the Department of Interior and attacked critics as narrow minded and politically motivated. Ironically, these were the same basic criticisms levied against his department by the federal court.”
While Salazar manufactures a new biological opinion on the matter to get the courts off his back, unemployment and drought plague the Central Valley. And the White House stands by its “scientists.”
—Dams in distress. In Siskiyou County, Ore., local officials and residents announced last week that it intends to sue Salazar and Team Obama over their potential removal of dams on the Klamath River. Once again, the administration’s systematic disregard for sound science and the rule of law is in the spotlight.
Salazar is expected to make a decision by the end of March on environmentalists’ demands that four private hydroelectric dams be demolished to protect salmon habitats and “create” demolition and habitat restoration jobs. Opponents say Salazar has already predetermined the outcome. Green activists blithely ignore the massive taxpayer costs (an estimated half-billion dollars) and downplay the environmental destruction the dam removals would impose. GOP Rep. Tom McClintock put it most charitably: “To tear down four perfectly good hydroelectric dams at enormous cost is insane.”
People of faith aren’t what’s bedeviling America. Blame the high voodoo priests of eco-destruction in Washington who have imposed a green theocracy on us all. Science be damned.
Speaking of fakery, at Scientific American, a presumably “liberal” columnist explores Peter Gleick’s recent immolation, and works hard to talk himself into believing that lying to advance the right left cause is perfectly justified. After hemming and hawing over the philosophical pros and cons, here’s his conclusion:
Kant said that when judging the morality of an act, we must weigh the intentions of the actor. Was he acting selfishly, to benefit himself, or selflessly, to help others? By this criterion, Gleick’s lie was clearly moral, because he was defending a cause that he passionately views as righteous. Gleick, you might say, is a hero comparable to Daniel Ellsberg, the military analyst who in 1971 stole and released documents that revealed that U.S. officials lied to justify the war in Vietnam.
But another philosopher my students and I are reading, the utilitarian John Stuart Mill, said that judging acts according to intentions is not enough. We also have to look at consequences. And if Gleick’s deception has any consequences, they will probably be harmful. His exposure of the Heartland Institute’s plans, far from convincing skeptics to reconsider their position, will probably just confirm their suspicions about environmentalists. Even if Gleick’s lie was morally right, it was strategically wrong.
I’ll give the last word to one of my students. The Gleick incident, he said, shows that the “debate” over global warming is not really a debate any more. It’s a war, and when people are waging war, they always lie for their cause.
Umm, if it’s “a war,” who are you at war with? God? Mother Nature? Your fellow man who disagrees with you? If it’s the latter, does that man that violence is justified in the name of “war?” The “moral equivalent of war” argument has been used to justify a century’s worth of bad decisions by the left. But if you’ve shaved off the first three words of that formula, who will you attack next?
Of course, as the old cliché goes, truth is the first casualty of war. Even eco-war, I guess. But perhaps what’s relatively new are members of the left who are willing to publicly admit they’re lying, as we explored in 2010, when a member of the Journalist, the self-described “non-official campaign” to elect Obama in 2008 tweeted:
As I noted back then, legacy media house organ Editor & Publisher ran a piece in 2007 that advocated similar tactics for the man-made global warming crowd titled “Climate Change: Get Over Objectivity, Newspapers.”
Not to mention former CBS anchorman Dan Rather telling Bill O’Reilly back in 2001 that “I think you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things:”
Bill O’Reilly: “I want to ask you flat out, do you think President Clinton’s an honest man?” Dan Rather: “Yes, I think he’s an honest man.” O’Reilly: “Do you, really?” Rather: “I do.” O’Reilly: “Even though he lied to Jim Lehrer’s face about the Lewinsky case?” Rather: “Who among us has not lied about something?” O’Reilly: “Well, I didn’t lie to anybody’s face on national television. I don’t think you have, have you?” Rather: “I don’t think I ever have. I hope I never have. But, look, it’s one thing – “ O’Reilly: “How can you say he’s an honest guy then?” Rather: “Well, because I think he is. I think at core he’s an honest person. I know that you have a different view. I know that you consider it sort of astonishing anybody would say so, but I think you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things.”
— Exchange on Fox News Channel’s The O’Reilly Factor, May 15, 2001.
And former Democrat Congressman Paul Kanjorski of Pennsylvania, who lost his reelection bid in 2010, telling his constituents in 2008 this his party lied to take back Congress in 2006:
“I’ll tell you my impression. We really in this last election, when I say we…the Democrats, I think pushed it as far as we can to the end of the fleet, didn’t say it, but we implied it. That if we won the Congressional elections, we could stop the war. Now anybody was a good student of Government would know that wasn’t true. But you know, the temptation to want to win back the Congress, we sort of stretched the facts…and people ate it up.”
There’s something Eric Hoffer said: “Intellectuals cannot operate at room temperature.” There always has to be a crisis–some terrible reason why their superior wisdom and virtue must be imposed on the unthinking masses. It doesn’t matter what the crisis is. A hundred years ago it was eugenics. At the time of the first Earth Day a generation ago, the big scare was global cooling, a big ice age. They go from one to the other. It meets their psychological needs and gives them a reason for exercising their power.
And justifying lying. Fortunately, then and now, the American public as a whole are much smarter than the nature fakers, and as Steve Hayward writes in the Weekly Standard,they don’t much like being bullied:
The Gleick episode exposes again a movement that disdains arguing with its critics, choosing demonization over persuasion and debate. A confident movement would face and crush its critics if its case were unassailable, as it claims. The climate change fight doesn’t even rise to the level of David and Goliath. Heartland is more like a David fighting a hundred Goliaths. Yet the serial ineptitude of the climate campaign shows that a tiny David doesn’t need to throw a rock against a Goliath who swings his mighty club and only hits himself square in the forehead.
Oh say, almost forgot. If it really is a war as Scientific America claims, if the American people want it concluded bad enough, it can be over — or at least the fighting by the aggressors greatly reduced — by Christmas:
In the future, all tenuously-acquired aesthetic beliefs will be the equivalent of World War II for at least 15 minutes — and the future is now:
An animal rights activist has been charged with hiring a hit man to kill a random fur-wearer, the New York Daily News reports.
An Ohio woman who compared animal-welfare work to the liberation of World War II concentration camps has been charged with soliciting a hit man to fatally shoot or slit the throat of a random fur-wearer, federal authorities said.
Meredith Lowell, 27, of Cleveland Heights, appeared Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Cleveland, where a magistrate judge ordered her held by the U.S. Marshals Service pending a hearing next week, court records show. One of her defense attorneys, Walter Lucas, declined comment when reached by phone after the court appearance.
Investigators say the FBI was notified in November of a Facebook page Lowell created under the alias Anne Lowery offering $830 to $850 for the hit and saying the ideal candidate would live in northeast Ohio, according to an FBI affidavit filed with the court on Friday.
Megan McArdle was, to my knowledge, the first to raise red flags over the authenticity of documents from the Heartland Institute, supposedly showing them acting all evil and stuff about the climate.
Most of the documents are real and are fairly bland. But one memo is in dispute. This memo, by McArdle’s reading, seems written not from the point of view of a climate change skeptic — who would naturally see himself as the good guy — but from the point of view of a climate change zealot impersonating a climate change skeptic — and is thus written, oddly, as if the person doing the writing believes himself to be a bad guy.
(My own take: I skipped this because I think the Likely Forged Document itself is pretty bland, too. If this is an attempt at a takedown, it seems pretty subtle to me. But subsequent events seem to show that Megan McArdle was likely right and my lack of interest was likely wrong.)
5. The worldview is different. In my experience, climate skeptics see themselves as a beleaguered minority fighting for truth and justice against the powerful, and nearly monolithic, forces of the establishment. They are David, to the climate scientists’ Goliaths. This is basically what the authenticated documents sound like.The memo, by contrast, uses more negative language about the efforts it’s describing, while trying to sound like they think it’s positive. It’s like the opposition political manifestos found in novels written by stolid ideologues; they can never quite bear (or lack the imagination) to let the villains have a good argument. Switch the names, and the memo could have been a page ripped out of State of Fear or Atlas Shrugged.
Basically, it reads like it was written from the secret villain lair in a Batman comic. By an intern.
McArdle’s theory is that the real information (bland stuff about donors) was in fact obtained by some lefty, but it wasn’t juicy enough. So someone faked up a Memo, basically a digest of the information in the other documents (or through Google), but wrote about that information in the most negative way possible, in order to juice up a pretty weak leak.
My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved. Nevertheless I deeply regret my own actions in this case. I offer my personal apologies to all those affected.
“It’s not my fault!” The end justify the means: The alleged evil of their opponents excuses any shoddy smear Gleick and his allies may perpetrate against them. And despite their admitted amorality, they wonder why we doubt their claims to “science”?
If it turns out that Gleick had a 2012 RatherGate moment, it wouldn’t be the first time that radical environmentalism has cooked the books, as we’ll discuss on the following page.
With various colleges determined to really emphasize the “liberal” half of the phrase “liberal arts” by offering courses on Occupy Wall Street, in the Wall Street Journal, Glenn Reynolds proffers “A Syllabus for the ‘Occupy’ Movement.” No word yet if he’ll be teaching this course himself at the University of Tennessee in the fall:
Schools from New York’s Columbia to Chicago’s Roosevelt University are offering courses on the “Occupy” movement. This has inspired some derision from the right, but I think that derision is misplaced. There is much that a course on the Occupy movement might profitably cover. Here are some possible lessons:
1) The Higher Education Bubble and Debt Slavery Throughout History. Since ancient times, debt has been a tool used by rulers to enslave the ruled, which is why the Bible explains that the borrower is the slave to the lender. One complaint of many Occupy protesters involves their pursuit of expensive degrees that has left them burdened by student loans but unable to find suitable employment. This unit would compare the marketing of higher education and student debt to today’s students with the techniques used to lure sharecroppers and coal miners into irredeemable indebtedness. Music to be provided by Tennessee Ernie Ford.
Back in the fall of 2010, James Taranto coined the phrase “Green Supremacists” to describe a particularly eliminationist-obsessed subset of radical environmentalists:
What kind of people blow up children?
White supremacists, for one example. On the morning of Sept. 15, 1963, members of a Ku Klux Klan “splinter group” set off dynamite under the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., killing four girls: Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley. Denise was 11; the other three were 14.
Islamic supremacists, for another example. Groups like Hamas and al Qaeda not only attack civilians indiscriminately but frequently employ Muslim children as suicide bombers. Our friend Brooke Goldstein made a whole movie about it.
There’s a new kind of supremacist on the scene: green supremacists. They haven’t blown up any children–not in real life. But they’ve been thinking about it.
A British outfit called the 10:10 Campaign hired Richard Curtis, a writer and producer of cinematic comedies, to produce a four-minute video promoting its effort to encourage people to cut “carbon emissions.” The result, titled “No Pressure,” struck James Delingpole, a global-warming skeptic who writes for London’s Daily Telegraph, as “deliciously, unspeakably, magnificently bleeding awful.” He’s being too kind.
You can see the 10:10 video embedded above, and earlier examples of green supremacists rounded up here. But Kate at Canada’s Small Dead Animals blog really puts the mindset behind it into context via a recent quote from a German environmentalist, who’s apparently taking Al Gore’s “Assault on Reason” book title just a little too literally. As Kate writes, “Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!”
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.
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).
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)
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.
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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