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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moe Lane adds:

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

See also: Churchill, Ward.

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

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

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

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In case you haven’t seen it, here’s a screencap of the top of the Drudge Report as of the time of this post.  The link on the headline takes you to a post at Breitbart.com written by Joel B. Pollack and titled “The Vetting — Exclusive — Obama’s Literary Agent in 1991 Booklet: ‘Born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.’” The article itself begins with a “Note from Senior Management” that cautions the reader, “Andrew Breitbart was never a ‘Birther,’ and Breitbart News is a site that has never advocated the narrative of ‘Birtherism:’”

In fact, Andrew believed, as we do, that President Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 4, 1961.

Yet Andrew also believed that the complicit mainstream media had refused to examine President Obama’s ideological past, or the carefully crafted persona he and his advisers had constructed for him.

It is for that reason that we launched “The Vetting,” an ongoing series in which we explore the ideological background of President Obama (and other presidential candidates)–not to re-litigate 2008, but because ideas and actions have consequences.

It is also in that spirit that we discovered, and now present, the booklet described below–one that includes a marketing pitch for a forthcoming book by a then-young, otherwise unknown former president of the Harvard Law Review.

It is evidence–not of the President’s foreign origin, but that Barack Obama’s public persona has perhaps been presented differently at different times.

The article goes on to note that “Breitbart News has obtained a promotional booklet produced in 1991 by Barack Obama’s then-literary agency, Acton & Dystel, which touts Obama as ‘born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.’”

Ace (who also reminds readers that he’s not a birther, either. For the record, neither are we) notes that Obama himself was likely the source of the copy in the screencap above, which is also presented in numerous other scans in the Brietbart.com article.

While it’s true that bios are often not written by the subject, the information in the bio must come from somewhere — and the obvious place to get such information is the subject himself.

I’ve been asked to write these myself — and in fact I owe someone one right now — and while they may be rewritten and edited, the guy asking you for the bio wants the basic information. He doesn’t want to go researching stuff which you can provide for him in 40 seconds.

So it seems very likely this came from Obama. Where else would Obama’s birthplace have come from? In 1991, Obama had not yet written his two (ahem) memoirs. He was not a famous man.

So, why did Obama say this?

Hey, it probably played well at the time, an early example of Jim Geraghty’s recurring theme that all of Obama’s statements have expiration dates on them. And so do Obama’s previous names, another way that he has altered the way he presented himself to the world at various times.

All of which dovetails into the question that Roger L. Simon asks at the Tatler: “Is Obama a Pathological Liar?”

We have always branded Bill Clinton a liar, at least about sex, and probably other things. But the amazing scoop by Breitbart.com today makes Obama one up on Bill. In all likelihood, the president will say that he never saw the information from his literary agents claiming he was born in Kenya. But as the author of 11 books, I can say that in EVERY instance that I have been published, I have seen such material in advance. It could be that Obama is the exception, but that is highly unlikely.

In other words, we have in the White House a man willing to bend his national identity for profit. Pretty cool! (He’s supposed to be cool, isn’t he? Well that’s as cool as it gets.)

Speaking of playing well during his college days, placing that 1991 bio into context also helps to explain what drives the Birthers, something that Mark Steyn discussed last year in his book After America:

With hindsight, this is what drove both the birthers and the countering cries of racism. Detractors and supporters alike were trying to explain something that was at first vaguely palpable and then became embarrassingly obvious: it’s not so much that he’s foreign to America, but that America is foreign to him. Outside the cloisters of Hyde Park and a few other enclaves, he doesn’t seem to get America. Not because he was born in Kenya or wherever, but because he’s the first president to be marinated his entire life in a post-modern, post-American cultural relativism. What’s worrying about Obama is not that he’s weird but that he’s so typical of much of the Eloi [Steyn's recurring H.G. Wells-inspired leitmotif in After America for the pampered elite -- Ed]; in that sense, his post-Americanness is all too American.

In both Chicago’s Ward Four, where the Obamas lived, and Ward Five, where they worked, 95 percent of electors voted Democrat in 2004. You would be hard put to find another constituency so committed to celebrating lack of diversity. Like most professional multiculturalists, Obama has passed his entire adulthood in a very narrow unicultural environment where your ideological worldview doesn’t depend on anything so tedious as actually viewing the world. The aforementioned Michael Ignatieff, who actually has viewed the world, gets close to the psychology in his response to criticisms of him for spending so much time abroad. Deploring such “provincialism,” he replied: “They say it makes me less of a Canadian. It makes me more of a Canadian.”

And how better to sound cool and exotic to Harvard’s professors (many of whom likely share the same punitive liberal worldview of America that Obama has marinated in much of his life) than to claim you weren’t born in America?

Related: At the Tatler, Myra Adams links to the Breitbart post and asks, “It is only May. Can you imagine what the October presidential campaign will look like?”

I hope for their sake that the Romney camp has.

Update: At Hot Air, Allahpundit adds:

An author born in colonial Kenya sounds more worldly at first blush than one born in Honolulu, just as a law professor who’s 1/32 Cherokee sounds more in tune with the minority experience in America than a white woman from Oklahoma. Beyond that, though, this is a story about the media: I’d bet cash money that some reporter somewhere stumbled upon this booklet in years past and politely suppressed the info rather than do the journalist’s job of asking questions and finding out why the mistake in the booklet was made. The alternative, that the media was so uninterested in O’s background that they never checked his professional listings, is grimly possible, but I’m skeptical. I think this is a case where someone probably heard about the booklet and ignored it in order to play gatekeeper so that the Birthers couldn’t exploit the information. That’s what the press has come to when the subject is Obama’s background.

Read the whole thing. And then click back over to Breitbart.com, where Ben Shapiro notes, “Obama’s Lit Agency Used ‘Born in Kenya’ Bio Until 2007″:

According to archive.org, a website that caches websites on a regular basis, [AKA The Internet Archieve Wayback Machine -- Ed] the Dystel.com website – the official website for Dystel & Goderich, Obama’s literary agents – was using the Barack Obama “born in Kenya” language until April 2007, just two months after then-Senator Obama declared his campaign for the presidency.

Here’s a screencap we made of the Dystel.com client list that the Wayback machine captured in April of 2007 lest it disappears; we’ve scrolled down to the relevant entry; click to enlarge:

Shapiro writes that apparently, sometime later in April of 2007, Obama’s bio at Dystel was revised to state that he was born in Hawaii. Speaking of the Wayback Machine, a commenter at Hot Air links to a 2004 Associated Press article archived there from the Nairobi-Kenya Standard and notes, “This has been around for a long time. But most people assumed it was a one-off error: Kenyan-born Obama all set for US Senate.” Here’s its lede:

Kenyan-born US Senate hopeful, Barrack Obama, appeared set to take over the Illinois Senate seat after his main rival, Jack Ryan, dropped out of the race on Friday night amid a furor over lurid sex club allegations.

Snopes, the left-leaning veteran fact-checking Website has a 2009 article debunking this article; one can only imagine how crazy they’re going there today.

Similarly, Obama’s former literary agent has decided to do one last bit of damage control today for her old client:

Miriam Goderich issued the following statement to Political Wire:

“You’re undoubtedly aware of the brouhaha stirred up by Breitbart about the erroneous statement in a client list Acton & Dystel published in 1991 (for circulation within the publishing industry only) that Barack Obama was born in Kenya.  This was nothing more than a fact checking error by me — an agency assistant at the time.  There was never any information given to us by Obama in any of his correspondence or other communications suggesting in any way that he was born in Kenya and not Hawaii.  I hope you can communicate to your readers that this was a simple mistake and nothing more.”

But one they kept making for 16 years. Still though, nice of Goderich to take the fall herself. As Mark Steyn likes to quip:

When the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan dumped some of his closest cabinet colleagues to extricate himself from a political crisis, the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe responded: “Greater love hath no man than to lay down his friends for his life.”

And the wheels of the bus go ’round and ’round.

More: Vindication for Jack Cashill, who believes that Bill Ayers wrote Dreams From My Father? Roger adds his his video interview today with Cashill to discuss these latest revelations to his Tatler post:

Related: Jim Treacher squares the circle: “Obama wasn’t born in Kenya, except when he claims he was born in Kenya:”

Either Obama was born in Kenya or he wasn’t. I remain skeptical that he was. The question is, then: Why did he claim to be? What advantage did he think it gave him at the time?

Maybe Elizabeth Warren can tell us…

To coin a popular Blogospheric phrase, heh.

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The Washington Free Beacon “Illustrates White House’s insertion of Obama into other presidential biographies.” Click over for the Photoshops — and then stop by the “Obama In History” Tumblr site for even more.

(Via Twitchy, which rounds up reaction on Twitter to the “unexpectedly” fragile ego of our 44th president.)

Update: Yes, this is true: Though Elvis is indeed everywhere, Barack Obama has no Elvis in him.

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“There is a delicious irony in seeing private luxury jets flying into Washington, D.C., and people coming off of them with tin cups in their hand, saying that they’re going to be trimming down and streamlining their businesses,” Rep. Gary Ackerman, D-New York, told the chief executive officers of Ford, Chrysler and General Motors at a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee.

“It’s almost like seeing a guy show up at the soup kitchen in high hat and tuxedo. It kind of makes you a little bit suspicious.”

He added, “couldn’t you all have downgraded to first class or jet-pooled or something to get here? It would have at least sent a message that you do get it.”

– “Big Three auto CEOs flew private jets to ask for taxpayer money,” CNN, November 19, 2008.

• “President Barack Obama’s broadside against giving corporate jet owners a tax break scored him some populist points while potentially saving taxpayers $3 billion over the next decade.”

– “Obama’s Private-Jet Offensive,” the Daily Beast, June 30th, 2011.

• “Obama aide promises $1B in corporate-jet subsidies.”

– Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner, today.

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Lending even more prescience to I Own the World’s Photoshop from the start of the month, the Politico reports today:

Elizabeth Warren has pushed back hard on questions about a Harvard Crimson piece in 1996 that described her as Native American, saying she had no idea the school where she taught law was billing her that way and saying it never came up during her hiring a year earlier, which others have backed up.

But a 1997 Fordham Law Review piece described her as Harvard Law School’s “first woman of color,” based, according to the notes at the bottom of the story, on a “telephone interview with Michael Chmura, News Director, Harvard Law (Aug. 6, 1996).”

The mention was in the middle of a lengthy and heavily-annotated Fordham piece on diversity and affirmative action and women. The title of the piece, by Laura Padilla, was “Intersectionality and positionality: Situating women of color in the affirmative action dialogue.”

(See also: 7 pols with Native American heritage)

“There are few women of color who hold important positions in the academy, Fortune 500 companies, or other prominent fields or industries,” the piece says. “This is not inconsequential. Diversifying these arenas, in part by adding qualified women of color to their ranks, remains important for many reaons. For one, there are scant women of color as role models. In my three years at Stanford Law School, there were no professors who were women of color. Harvard Law School hired its first woman of color, Elizabeth Warren, in 1995.”

Meanwhile, at Big Journalism today, “Buried in the ‘For the Record’ section, the Boston Globe today admitted that it made a major error in one of its initial reports on Elizabeth Warren’s claim of Native American ancestry.”

And speaking of Photoshops from I Own the World, for your monitor’s safety, please ensure that all beverages have been properly digested before clicking on this link.

Update: Linking to this post, Jonah Goldberg tweets, “Elizabeth Warren was Harvard Law’s ‘first woman of color’? It’s like a Tom Wolfe novel.” Indeed — and note that it’s filed under our “God and Man at Dupont University” category.

Related: Michelle Malkin tweets, “Only in ProgWorld am I considered white, while pasty Elizabeth Warren is heralded as a ‘woman of color.’”

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Past performance is once again no guarantee of future results:

Every appearance by a top Republican official or candidate should be recorded. Every one of them.All it takes is one “Macaca” incident to transform a race or create one where one didn’t exist. As the Montana incident blogged earlier today showed, a video can knock out prospective candidates before they even enter.

And this is no longer about finding one big blunder to put on a campaign commercial. It’s about using video and (free) technologies like YouTube to build narratives about opponents, using their own words, at their own events.

– Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos, from May of 2007. Plenty on the right would also take him up on the offer beginning in 2009, although one of the most lethal “gotchas” by that rarest of birds, the enterprising Huffington Post journalist, who captured Obama with her cell phone video in 2008 delivering his Bitter Clingers speech, the very definition of a Kinsleyesque gaffe.

Which brings us to this item at BuzzFeed yesterday: “Cell Phone Ban Keeps Obama Fundraisers Secret:”

Former aides to presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, Rick Perry, and Jon Huntsman all expressed surprise at the practice, and they’ve never seen an instance where a campaign asked donors to surrender their cell phones.

The former Clinton aide called the Obama policy “absurd,” suggesting that the Obama policy is almost certainly a response to the infamous 2008 fundraiser where Obama described voters in rural Pennsylvania as “bitter.”

“They cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,” Obama told donors in San Francisco, in a gaffe that breathed new life into Clinton’s campaign at the time.

“What is he hiding? Candidates should be for and against the same issue in private as they are in public,” said former Perry campaign manager Rob Johnson. “This shows just how uncomfortable the Obama team is with their message an their candidate. And in addition to religion and guns, voters like to cling to their cell phones.”

Presumably this ban is valid in all 57 states, and Obama will dispatch the necessary corpse-men to enforce it, even if they have to confiscate every cell phone in Cominsky Park.

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The Huffington Post reports: “Mitt Romney: Obama Spending Has Fanned ‘Prairie Fire Of Debt:’”

Republican Mitt Romney says President Barack Obama’s reckless spending has fanned a “prairie fire of debt” while portraying himself in a speech in battleground Iowa as the defender of fiscal responsibility.

The likely GOP presidential nominee is trying to frame his campaign against the Democratic president as a contest of fairness versus irresponsibility.

In a speech Tuesday afternoon in Iowa, Romney will say that, in his words, “a prairie fire of debt is sweeping across Iowa and our nation and every day we fail to act we feed that fire with our own lack of resolve.”

A “Prairie Fire,” you say? Could be a coincidence, or it could be a reference to what my fellow PJ Columnist Zombie dug up in October of 2008 — “William Ayers’ forgotten communist manifesto: Prairie Fire:”

As Zombie noted back then, this was the title of one of Ayers’ Weather Underground manifestos. Click over for numerous scanned pages, including:

The following snippet is taken from the book’s dedication page, and shows that the Weather Underground dedicated the book to Robert F. Kennedy’s killer Sirhan Sirhan, among many other now-obscure ’60s-era radicals, criminals and revolutionaries:

Anybody told Ethel and Caroline of this book’s existence, or Ayers’ relationship to Obama?

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As Jonah Goldberg noted in Liberal Fascism, the “Progressives” of a century ago were astonishingly racist, including such figures as Woodrow Wilson, Margaret Sanger, HG Wells, and George William Hunter, who wrote the book that John Scopes desired to teach in his classroom. A century later, and Chris Matthews demonstrates that everything comes full circle:

Matthews interviewed Bishop Harry Jackson, who has spoken out against Barack Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage. Speaking of Jesus Christ, Matthews ridiculously linked accusations that Mitt Romney once bullied a teen, nearly 50 years ago: “Do you think [Christ] would have been chasing after the kid with long hair and cutting his hair or he would have been the one protecting the kid with long hair in high school?”

Matthews sarcastically added, “But you’re with the guy who was going after the kid with long hair.” (Pastor Jackson informed the host that he was not, yet, supporting Romney.)

Fellow black minister, Reverend Delman Coates also appeared on the show. After Coates indicated he supported gay marriage, Jackson retorted, “Why not let the Muslims have polygamy and bigamy?”

This prompted Matthews to insultingly suggest: “I hope you evolve. Thank you very much. I’m just teasing.”

Considering Matthews routinely plays the race card, will he apologize for telling a black man to “evolve?”

Now we know why MSNBC hired Al Sharpton to appear on the network — it’s insurance that he won’t be hosting another show trial against a fallen MSNBC anchor.

Related: At Hot Air, Ed Morrissey notes, “Video: Preachers in Baltimore blast Obama for same-sex marriage stance:”

No one expects the congregants of Pastor Burns’ church to run out and vote for Romney, but they’re going to be a lot less enthused about Obama — and a lack of enthusiasm in his base will put an end to hopes of a second term. Maryland is a safe state for Democrats under normal conditions; it last went Republican in 1988, and Obama won it by 25 points in 2008.  However, the same reason for that large margin of victory shows the risk for Obama, which is that 30% of the vote in the state comes from the African-American community that Pastor Burns and others serve.

Which is one reply to the question that Obama tacitly asks his base whenever he zigs to the right, alienating his anti-war base by not closing Gitmo and keeping in place many elements of GWB’s GWOT tactics, then zags to the left, alienating black and other minority voters in supporting gay marriage. Where is Obama’s base going to go?

Possibly not out of their homes on election day.

Update: Jim Treacher writes, “Ain’t no politics like identity politics ’cause identity politics don’t stop.”

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I shouted out who played the Kennedys, when after all, it was Barack Hussein. At the Blaze, Jonathon M. Seidl writes, “Despite endorsing Obama in 2008, JFK’s daughter Caroline now considers Obama a ‘liar,’ according to a family source in Edward Klein’s new book on Obama called ‘The Amateur.’ After spotlighting numerous examples of bad blood between the Kennedy family and the man Teddy and Caroline designed as JFK’s successor in 2008, Seidl concludes:

Ethel Kennedy, “the matriarch of the family,” similarly felt scorned, according to Klein. He tells a story of her invitation — extended to the First Family — being ignored by the Obamas. She got so upset “that she went on a rampage inside her house, cursing the president and turning over furniture.”

And to top it all of, Caroline, the family source tells Klein in the book, believes “that as a loyal Democrat, she has nowhere to go, no one else to possibly support except Obama.”

(Related: Explosive New Book: Bill Clinton Thought Obama an ‘Amateur,’ Urged Hillary to Quit and Run in 2012)

And guess what: “the Obamas know that she has nowhere else to go, so they see no point in being nice to her.”

That “really pisses her off.”

Wait, the Obama administration is cruel to a prominent female Democrat — I’m shocked, shocked!

But really, where else can Caroline and the rest of the Kennedy clan go?

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At the Tatler, Bryan Preston observes the shameless hackery of Patrick Pexton, the Washington Post’s ombudsman, who punts rather than dealing with the paper’s botched hit piece on Mitt Romney high school days this past week:

Pexton says the story holds up to scrutiny, despite the fact that the story directly quoted a dead man; it claimed things about him that, being dead, he is in no position to affirm or refute; it mischaracterized the opinion of one of its core witnesses; and the family of the dead man says the story is factually inaccurate.

Other than that, it holds right up.

Pexton also admits that the Post timed the story to help the president.

The other criticisms are that this story was published knowing that President Obama was going to announce his shift in favor of gay marriage. The allegation is that somehow The Post is working with the White House to time the story.

Do I think The Post took advantage of the timing? Yes. Vice President Biden had telegraphed the president’s position on gay marriage just days earlier. This story on Romney was in preparation for three weeks. It is part of a series of biographical stories on Romney being written by Horowitz and others and edited by The Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and associate editor, David Maraniss, who is known for his best- selling biographies of major U.S. political figures.

That’s a fallacious appeal to authority. Just because David Maraniss had a hand in it and a committee of liberals handed him a trophy does not make this story factual or fair. Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer too.

If I were an editor I might have sped it up a little, too, to take advantage of the national discussion on gay marriage. Does that mean Post editors are timing stories with the White House? I hope not, and I doubt that is the case.

As Bryan writes, “But he didn’t pick up the phone and ask them, so deep is his curiosity on the subject. Pitiful.”

Pexton’s line that “Does that mean Post editors are timing stories with the White House? I hope not, and I doubt that is the case” is even more of an eye-roller when you consider the Post’s deep involvement in the JournoList fiasco, not to mention an earlier report in MSM house organ Editor & Publisher that the Post was coordinating cover stories with the New York Times.

But hey, given the disastrous economic straits of the Obamaconomy, shaped by the man the Post admitted to championing in 2008, I’m sympathetic both to Pexton’s desire for job security, and for looking out for future employment. After all, having “Washington Post Ombudsman” on your resume won’t look anywhere near as impressive if it’s followed by “Washington Post Reporter: Baltimore Sewer Board Zoning Regulation Hearings,” which is where Pexton would likely be transferred, if not fired, if he actually lived up to his current job title.

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Hmmmmm: Stacy McCain writes that “the revelation that an ex-girlfriend in Dreams was a ‘composite’ or ‘compression’ of several women — as President Obama reportedly told biographer David Marannis — has focused new attention on [Jack] Cashill’s argument that [Bill] Ayers was Obama’s ghostwriter.”

The so-called “New York girlfriend” in Obama’s memoir bears specific resemblance to Ayers’s ex-girlfriend Diana Oughton, one of three Weather Underground members killed in 1970 when a bomb the terrorist group was building accidentally exploded.

Like the girlfriend in Obama’s memoir, Oughton had brown hair and green eyes, and came from an affluent background. Furthermore, Oughton’s family estate in Illinois is strikingly similar to one described in a sequence in Dreams when Obama and his “New York girlfriend” visit her family.

Read the whole thing, and decide for yourself. Though as fellow Bay Area blogger Bookworm Room adds, “What are the odds that you’d combine a whole lot of different women in your life, and then come up with Bill Ayers’ girlfriend?”

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“Obama Scores as Exotic Who Says Nothing,” which, as we mentioned yesterday, Froma Harrop wrote at Real Clear Politics at the end of 2006:

What Obama really thinks should be done about health care and the terrorist threat remain secrets that his book does not unlock. His two years in the Senate certainly haven’t revealed any bold policy ideas.

This leave-them-guessing strategy slips out in the book’s prologue. “I serve as a blank screen,” Obama writes, “on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” He notifies readers that “my treatment of the issues is often partial and incomplete.” It takes some doing for a politician to write a 364-page book, his second volume, and skate past all controversy.

The leave ‘em guessing strategy worked so well that two years later, Tom Brokaw and Charlie Rose had the following exchange on the eve of the 2008 election:

CHARLIE ROSE: I don’t know what Barack Obama’s worldview is.

TOM BROKAW: No, I don’t, either.

ROSE: I don’t know how he really sees where China is.

BROKAW: We don’t know a lot about Barack Obama and the universe of his thinking about foreign policy.

ROSE: I don’t really know. And do we know anything about the people who are advising him?

BROKAW: Yeah, it’s an interesting question.

ROSE: He is principally known through his autobiography and through very aspirational (sic) speeches.

BROKAW: Two of them! I don’t know what books he’s read.

ROSE: What do we know about the heroes of Barack Obama?

BROKAW: There’s a lot about him we don’t know.

Almost a month after the election, a CNN journalist wrote, “The Americans who are comparing him to those remarkable predecessors are putting a lot of faith in a man they barely know.”

Flash-forward to yesterday, where Jonathan Bernstein wrote at the Washington Post:

There’s a Republican-driven idea out there, one Sarah Palin is big on repeating, that Barack Obama wasn’t fully vetted by the press in 2008. It’s preposterous. The truth is that Obama has been the mainstream Democrat he ran as, and I’d guess that it’s very difficult to tie whatever idiosyncrasies he’s had within that to anything in particular about his personal history, and certainly not anything we didn’t know about in November 2008.

Which seems fair, when Tom Brokaw, Charlie Rose and a CNN staffer each admitted they didn’t know anything about the guy they had just voted for and for whom they and their networks had spent the entire year leading his cheerleading squad.

Speaking of not knowing the president, the Post today runs an excerpt from David Maraniss’s Oba-biography, focusing on Barack Obama, JFK-style liberal hawk:

On a personal level, he seems at ease in the presence of soldiers and sailors, more so than he would be in the midst of an antiwar rally; on a policy level he seems increasingly comfortable wielding the powers of a commander in chief.

Obama is the first president to whom Vietnam is ancient history. He carries none of the psychological baggage of that war, for better or worse. Every young man in the baby-boom generation of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush had to deal with Vietnam somehow, but by the time Obama came of age, the war and the draft were over. His liberal mother felt at home in the peace movement, and he took many characteristics from her, but he also chafed at her idealistic naivete, which he viewed as a relic of the ’60s. From an early age he wanted to be harder and cooler than his mother, less Pollyannaish, more pragmatic. His use of the military option in his foreign policy reflects that dual sensibility. Clinton grew up wanting to be JFK, but Obama thinks more like him.

He does? The guy who launched his political career in Bill Ayers’ living room? Who spent 20 years at the foot of Rev. Jeremiah “God Damn America” Wright’s pulpit? Who during his stopover for coffee in the Senate dressed down Gen. Petraeus? Whose early campaign ad promised he would gut military spending? Who returned the Churchill bust to England? The guy who says “Corpse-man?”

Incidentally, doesn’t this completely obliterate Bernstein’s column yesterday? Who in 2008 knew that compared to Obama, John McCain was such a dovish pantywaist?

Of course, to whatever extent Obama is comfortable with the military, it could be because he’d like more of civilian America to resemble them, as Matthew Continetti writes at the Washington Free Beacon on “Generalissimo Obama:”

The way to “honor” American heroes who serve overseas, Obama said, is “by coming together, all of us, and working to secure the dream that so many generations have fought for—the dream that a better life awaits anyone who is willing to work for it and reach for it.”

What does “coming together” mean? Why, silly, it means passing Obama’s domestic agenda: more money for education and job training and to “jumpstart industries that create jobs, and end our dependence on foreign oil,” and just happen to be owned by donors to the president’s campaigns. Missing from the 2010 speech was a line saying the path to heroism is through support for the Buffett Rule, probably because David Axelrod hadn’t yet come up with that particular gimmick.

The nation-as-army metaphor reemerged, dramatically, as the 2012 campaign began. Jonah Goldberg was justifiably disgusted at the message of this year’s State of the Union Address, in which the president suggested that Americans as a whole might take their cues from uniformed soldiers who are “not consumed with personal ambition,” “don’t obsess over their differences,” “focus on the mission at hand,” and “work together.”

Obama finds inspiration in the most hierarchical and selfless elements of military life. “Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example,” he said. We imagine all of us would have to buy health insurance. Taxes and spending would be high. A new Volt would sit in every driveway.

The commander-in-chief issued additional orders in recent days. When he unveiled his latest campaign slogan Monday, he told his supporters, and presumably the rest of the country, that it is time to march “Forward,” lemming-like, off a cliff.

And on Tuesday, in the televised address at the close of his targeted Afghan night raid, Obama challenged his audience to “summon that same sense of common purpose” one finds in “our soldiers, our sailors, our airmen, Marines, Coast Guardsmen, and civilians in Afghanistan,” and “redouble our efforts to build a nation worthy of their sacrifice.”

Obama’s social militarism inverts civil-military relations in a democratic republic. Traditionally—and one suspects that this is still the case for practically all servicemen—men and women join the Armed Forces because they believe America is worthy of their duty and protection. But Obama seems to suggest that, sorry, we are not quite there yet. The America that actually is “worthy of their sacrifice” has not come into existence. It exists “forward,” somewhere in the future. We must bring it into being by emulating the self-sacrificing troops, by suppressing our ambition and disagreement and differences, by “focusing on the mission” of building our country on a New Foundation.

The left’s century-old Moral Equivalent of War trope sure has some half-life, huh?

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For his newest composite girlfriend, couldn’t Obama and his ghostwriters have chosen a name that wasn’t prominently featured in George Orwell’s 1984? (Cool song by the Eurythmics though.) As David Steinberg writes at the Tatler:

The Obama 2012 campaign released the epic government-fueled travails of “Julia” today, a slideshow supposedly relating how an Obama presidency can benefit the life of the average American woman. “Benefit”, as in pay for each of her progressive-approved hipster doofus life-choices (“Age 22: She starts her career as a web designer”).

Right off the bat, “#Julia” trended to the top of Twitter as the second-most popular current hashtag in the United States; to the horror of David Axelrod and the increasingly dated tacticians of the Obama campaign, virtually every mention of #Julia was a conservative mocking the slideshow. Our Vodkapundit nailed it with:

“#Julia is a #composite of all the ways @BarackObama would like to buy the women’s vote.”

“On my count, the last five hashtags introduced by Obama’s campaign have been instant public relations disasters; another smear tactic backfired into the legendary #ObamaEatsDogs,” David concludes. (Read the whole thing.™)

Not to mention, serving, as the original Julia did, as a reminder of the horrors of a Nanny State run amok:

There was no telescreen, but there must be hidden microphones: besides, they could be seen. It did not matter, nothing mattered. They could have lain down on the ground and done that if they had wanted to. His flesh froze with horror at the thought of it. She made no response whatever to the clasp of his arm; she did not even try to disengage herself. He knew now what had changed in her. Her face was sallower, and there was a long scar, partly hidden by the hair, across her forehead and temple; but that was not the change. It was that her waist had grown thicker, and, in a surprising way, had stiffened. He remembered how once, after the explosion of a rocket bomb, he had helped to drag a corpse out of some ruins, and had been astonished not only by the incredible weight of the thing, but by its rigidity and awkwardness to handle, which made it seem more like stone than flesh. Her body felt like that. It occurred to him that the texture of her skin would be quite different from what it had once been.

He did not attempt to kiss her, nor did they speak. As they walked back across the grass, she looked directly at him for the first time. It was only a momentary glance, full of contempt and dislike. He wondered whether it was a dislike that came purely out of the past or whether it was inspired also by his bloated face and the water that the wind kept squeezing from his eyes. They sat down on two iron chairs, side by side but not too close together. He saw that she was about to speak. She moved her clumsy shoe a few centimetres and deliberately crushed a twig. Her feet seemed to have grown broader, he noticed.

‘I betrayed you,’ she said baldly.

‘I betrayed you,’ he said.

She gave him another quick look of dislike.

‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘they threaten you with something — something you can’t stand up to, can’t even think about. And then you say, “Don’t do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to So-and-so.” And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn’t really mean it. But that isn’t true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there’s no other way of saving yourself, and you’re quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don’t give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself.’

‘All you care about is yourself,’ he echoed.

‘And after that, you don’t feel the same towards the other person any longer.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘you don’t feel the same.’

There did not seem to be anything more to say. The wind plastered their thin overalls against their bodies. Almost at once it became embarrassing to sit there in silence: besides, it was too cold to keep still. She said something about catching her Tube and stood up to go.

‘We must meet again,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we must meet again.’

Related thoughts on “The cradle-to-grave, government-supported existence of ‘Julia,” from Morrissey, Ed 655321, an Outer Party member who blogs via a two-way telescreen located in one of Oceania’s more frigid climates.

Update: “Alas, Team Obama has omitted a few milestones from the life of Julia.” Actually, Julia should be pretty comfortable working the Memory Hole by now.

More: Heh, indeed. Just click.™

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“Why it matters that Obama dated a composite and ate a dog,” as explored by Tim Stanley in the London Telegraph:

There was a brief media firestorm yesterday when Vanity Fair broke the news that Obama’s famous “New York girlfriend” was a fiction. She appears in his 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father, described in some detail by her appearance, voice and mannerisms. But a new biography of Obama – with an excerpt published in Vanity Fair – “reveals” that she was actually an amalgam of several different women. Politico immediately ran with “Obama: ‘New York girlfriend’ was composite” and Drudge headlined with “Obama Admits Fabricating Girlfriend in a Memoir.” Coming hot on the heels of the news that the Pres once ate a dog, his weirdo factor seems to have hit the roof.

Actually, it turns out that Obama always said that his New York squeeze was a fake. Within a couple of hours of the story breaking, journalists pointed out that at the beginning of Dreams From My Father it reads, “For the sake of compression, some of the characters that appear are composites of people, I’ve known, and some events appear out of precise chronology.” Politico was forced to print a humiliating correction and David Graham of The Atlantic went in for the kill: “Politico has served as an unwitting pawn in a game conservative spinmeisters are playing to redefine Obama between now and November … It’s much the same as the flap over Obama eating dog, in which a different piece of Dreams From My Father, in which he describes eating canine meat as a boy in Indonesia, was rediscovered. While conservative activists and journalists present these stories while claiming that Obama wasn’t properly vetted four years ago, what’s actually happening is they’re reintroducing facts to the record, this time with a far more negative spin.”

Wow, they move fast at the Atlantic — on Sunday morning, Garance Franke-Ruta tweeted “My favorite DC/world disconnect at #WHCD dinner lst nite was when frmr politico now in NY asked why Obama kept talking about eating dogs.” Now another Atlantic scribe is claiming that everybody knows this stuff, it’s all old news — move along, these aren’t the dogs you were looking for. Why are we discussing the president’s past, anyhow?

But to answer the other half of his complaint, given how many members of the Politico were on the JournoList in 2008, that self-described “non-official campaign” to elect Obama, it’s a little late for anybody there to worry now about being used as pawns.

Fortunately, the Telegraph’s Stanley isn’t buying the spin from the American left:

I’m not sure. What stands out from the composite story isn’t that Obama amalgamated characters, it’s that the press hadn’t noticed until now. As with the dog story, this confirms the suspicion that the mainstream media gave Obama a free pass in 2008 and declined to check too deeply into his background. Even The Atlantic’s Graham admits that he’s never read Dreams From My Father, and neither, it would seem, has anyone else in the press corps. They have the excuse that the book is incredibly narcissistic and boring, but otherwise isn’t this exactly the sort of character assessment/assassination that should have happened four years ago?

Not at all. The American legacy media in general (and the Atlantic in particular, what with Michael Kelly sadly deceased and Mark Steyn traded in 2007 for Andrew Sullivan and draft choices to be named later) serves as a de facto extension of the DNC. Near the start of 2008, Democrats very quickly coalesced around the least experienced candidate to be their nominee, a man who described himself cheerfully as “a blank screen.”

Here’s a flashback to Real Clear Politics at the end of 2006, where Froma Harrop wrote that “Obama Scores as Exotic Who Says Nothing:”

What Obama really thinks should be done about health care and the terrorist threat remain secrets that his book does not unlock. His two years in the Senate certainly haven’t revealed any bold policy ideas.

This leave-them-guessing strategy slips out in the book’s prologue. “I serve as a blank screen,” Obama writes, “on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” He notifies readers that “my treatment of the issues is often partial and incomplete.” It takes some doing for a politician to write a 364-page book, his second volume, and skate past all controversy.

Obama does seem to have an impressive resume and polish. And it’s not his fault that a mania for some new political face intrudes on every presidential election season. But one does wish, for the sake of democracy, that we could skip the crush and give less glamorous contenders who actually say something more of a hearing.

Any time now, fellas. A year later, the press had been given their marching orders, their job was to keep bad news about their man out  of circulation, keep him as a self described political chameleon — even at the expense of their reputations, even at the expense of selling newspapers or bolstering their TV ratings.

Back to the London Telegraph for Stanley conclusion:

That’s the significance of the canine and composite revelations – both of them, aside from their delightful “dish” factors, not really revelations at all. That we are only discussing them this late into Obama’s career suggests that the vetting that should have happened four years ago was unforgivably neglected. But, hey, it’s never too late to start.

I agree — but as we’ve seen, the MSM having vacated their job long ago, that’s largely the job of new media, not old.

Update: “Barack Obama, Sarong Man for America.”

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At Power Line, John Hinderaker spots this telling passage regarding “Barry’s Imaginary Girlfriend” from his college days:

It was striking to me that when Genevieve met Obama he was a 22-year-old college graduate, but hadn’t yet figured out what his name was. In high school, he had generally been called “Barry,” but by this time he apparently was looking for something more formal:

She called him Bahr-ruck, with the accent on the first syllable, and a trill of the r’s. Not Bear-ick, as the Anglophile Kenyans pronounced it, and not Buh-rock, as he would later be called, but Bahr-ruck. She said that is how he pronounced it himself, at least when talking to her.

I find that very odd. Think how fundamental a part of you your name is: when you were in elementary school, did you have any doubt about what to call yourself? At 22, Obama was still trying out names.

And even as late as age 37, he may have still be trying them out. Note that in the 1998 poster and press release for the “World Premiere” of “The Love Song of Saul Alinsky,” uncovered in Andrew Breitbart’s last article, the future 44th president was billed as State Senator “Baraka Obama.”

Was that a typo, or was Barry/Barack/Baraka still taking new names out for a spin?

Related: “So What Else Did Obama Fake in his Memoir?”

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Wikipedia — where anyone can falsely accuse an associate of Robert F. Kennedy of being “directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby,” but any mention that Obama ate a dog — despite Obama having now mentioned said fact on the record at least three times himself — is apparently verboten, at least during the election year.

Back in 2004, Robert McHenry, the former editor in chief of the Encyclopedia Britannica, dubbed its would-be Internet successor “The Faith-Based Encyclopedia” at Tech Central Station; in terms of quality control, it looks like little has changed in the interim.

Say, has anybody heard from Comrade Ogilvy recently?

Related: Speaking of Obama and the Memory Hole, meet “Barry’s Imaginary Girlfriend.” As Jim Geraghty writes, with some thoughts on both Obama’s college-era girlfriend and Elizabeth Warren, the 1/32nd Indian maiden, the password for 2012 is…“Composite.”

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It’s a dog doesn’t report the president eats dogs world in the MSM, as Mark Steyn writes:

My weekend column addressed Romney’s dog-transporting and Obama’s dog-eating – the former referenced by New York Times columnist Gail Collins some four dozen or so times, the latter not at all by her or any other Times bigshot. And yet there was the President of the United States up on stage doing dog-eating shtick in front of the nation. That represents an amazingly swift victory for the man who, all but entirely via Twitter, injected the topic into the public discourse – Jim Treacher.

Indeed,  as The Atlantic’s Garance Franke-Ruta wrote:

My favorite DC/world disconnect at #WHCD dinner lst nite was when frmr politico now in NY asked why Obama kept talking about eating dogs.

It’s not really a “DC/world” disconnect so much as a housetrained media/freelance bloodhound disconnect. If you rely for your news on the poodles of the Times, ABC, CBS, NBC, etc, or the self-neutered attack-dogs of the late-night comedy shows, you would, like Ms Franke-Ruta’s friend, have been utterly in the dark. Jim Treacher forced the President and his palace guard to break their own embargo. Or as he put it:

I win.

More from Treach (as my friend Steve Green likes to call him) in just a moment, but first a couple of more examples of cocooning. Next up, Moe Lane wonders why the Politico is “excusing in 2012 their lack of foresight about 2010:”

I need to push back on this cover-their-rear statement by Politico on the ‘surprise’ flipping of the House of Representatives in 2010.

[House Speaker John] Boehner doesn’t play political prognosticator often. But when he does, those close to him say, there’s usually a calculated reason. In April 2010 — almost two years ago exactly — the then-House minority leader said in a radio interview that an astounding 100 seats were in play in that year’s midterm elections, a figure he said was broader than “anything we’ve seen around here during my 20 years” in the House.

Few from either party believed Boehner at the time, but his assessment proved accurate. Republicans put about 100 Democratic-held seats in play, ultimately winning 63 of them to seize the majority.

(Bolding mine) Actually, people who read RedState (or MoeLane) were prepared for that scenario. People who read Sean Trende at RCP were prepared for that scenario. People who read Hot Air and AoSHQ were at least prepared for the possibility.  In fact, people who were following the election using right-leaning sites and news sourcess were by and large prepared for what happened. But the people were relying on the Daily Beast or the Left-blogosphere or, well, Politico for their political content? …Yeah, those folks ended up being kind of surprised in November. Usually unpleasantly.

Walter Russell Mead notes that “Walker Gains in Wisconsin: NYT Shields Readers From Distressing News:”

Intrade, a site where people can in effect bet on political races, shows Walker with a 68.5 percent chance of re-election as of Sunday morning. (By contrast, President Obama has only a 59.7 percent shot at a second term.) Recent polls on the race show Walker ahead, though the race is close and volatile — and the dynamics may change once the Democrats pick a nominee. None of this appears in this article.

Forget accusations of media bias and ideological agendas: this is a collapse of basic news judgment. On this issue at least, readers who rely on the New York Times to tell them what’s happening in the country — don’t know what’s happening in the country. They genuinely don’t know that in Wisconsin this all out mobilization by both sides on a polarizing question is, tentatively and certainly not irreversibly, but noticeably and to a certain degree increasingly… breaking Walker’s way.

Sometimes I wonder if the Times hasn’t been infiltrated by a group of stealth conservatives, a sleeper cell dedicated to making the left stupid and ineffectual. For liberals to be basking in a dream world in which OWS is effective and unions are fighting back and winning in Wisconsin is exactly what conservatives want. Look how it worked on Obamacare: not a serious liberal in the country thought the individual mandate could possibly be thought unconstitutional until, quite horribly, the Supreme Court justices started asking all those questions that the press had done its best to ignore.

And at Commentary, Jonathan S. Tobin writes,  “To listen to some Democrats lately, President Obama’s re-election is in the bag:”

The lead in the tracking polls has changed hands several times in the last few weeks, and we can expect it will continue to fluctuate in the coming months. As Gallup confirms, the matchup in the swing states that will decide the contest are as close as can be. If the Democrats think all Obama has to do is call the Republicans names and play the “cool kid” on late night television, they may be in for the shock of their lives when they discover that the competition for posts in his second administration is a waste of time.

If so, it wouldn’t be the first time. Way back in 2003, Mickey Kaus, via the Media Research Center defined “liberal cocooning,”  a phrase originally coined by J. Peter Mulhern in a 2001 Washington Weekly article thusly:

“The point is that reporters and editors at papers like the Times (either one!) are exquisitely sensitive to any sign that Democrats might win, but don’t cultivate equivalent sensitivity when it comes to discerning signs Republicans might win. (Who wants to read that?) The result, in recent years, is the Liberal Cocoon, in which Democratic partisans are kept happy and hopeful until they are slaughtered every other November.” Kaus’ subject was an article in the L.A. Times, but his theory applies equally well to the paper’s New York namesake.

The fiction of the size of the chocolate ration only heading a northward direction was easier to maintain over a decade ago when the liberal cocoon was nearly impenetrable; but as Jim Treacher illustrated last month, with the right meme, and a sufficient coordinate push, it’s entirely possible to toss it over the walls of the gatekeepers. Here’s Treacher himself, yesterday:

It’s just more proof that we don’t need these guys anymore. They’re not our gatekeepers. They’ve proven it over and over: ACORN. Rielle Hunter. Van Jones. Anthony Weiner. They keep trying and failing to cover up stories that don’t suit their agenda. They keep pretending they control the flow of information. They’re determined to prove their own obsolescence. And they’ve got the ratings and circulation numbers to prove it.

Anyway. Back to me! I’d like to take this opportunity to humbly acknowledge a few of the accolades bestowed upon me. It would be ungrateful not to, don’t you think?

Absolutely — you’ve earned the victory lap. But hopefully there will be more “inconvenient truths” that make it around the old media gatekeepers in a variety of mediums, in the coming weeks and months, including Twitter, which is where Treacher’s discovery of the president astonishing quote really got its (four) legs. Which is why, as John Nolte writes at Big Journalism, we saw a coordinated effort by the left to knock at least one conservative off that medium this past weekend:

What troubles these Leftists is that they now know that through Twitter Americans are not only having a national conversation in an environment the left fears most — without a mainstream media filter — but we are also freely and without that filter exchanging ideas and information.

What truly terrifies the left, though, is that Twitter is now where media narratives are generated that the mainstream media can no longer ignore. As recently as last year, narratives inconvenient to the Left that began on Twitter (i.e., Obama wouldn’t have found bin Laden without the water-boarding he opposed) and that would’ve surely been memory-holed otherwise, suddenly found their way into the MSM’s news-cycle against the MSM’s will.

Because the MSM can’t ignore (and better yet, control or filter) these conversations taking place amongst millions, the media is now forced to either report on this topic or look completely out of touch with what activist America is most passionate about. Moreover, you now have thousands upon thousands of citizen journalists directly challenging the media on their biases.

Speaking of biases and cocooning, one quick juxtapose before we wrap this topic up. As spotted by Tim Graham of Newsbusters, “WashPost Writes The Public Be Damned: They’re Biased If They Think We’re Biased:”

Saturday’s Washington Post included a story dismissing the public for believing the media has a bias, complete with the headline “Public has its own biases about media.”  It sounded like a twist on “I  Know You Are, But What Am I?” Media reporter Paul Farhi argued studies finding an increased perception of the media favoring “one side” since 1985 are somehow dashed because professors and their studies disagree.

Farhi threw massive doubt on the assertion of bias: “But have the media really become more biased? Or is this a case of perception trumping reality? In fact, there’s little to suggest that over the past few decades news reporting has become more favorable to one party.”

That would be news to the paper’s former ombudsperson, who wrote in 2008, “I’ll bet that most Post journalists voted for Obama. I did. There are centrists at The Post as well. But the conservatives I know here feel so outnumbered that they don’t even want to be quoted by name in a memo,” a few months before Newsweek, back when it was still owned by the Post declared, “We Are All Socialists Now” on its cover at the start of the Obama administration.

Or to paraphrase the Monty Python sketch on cannibalism in the Royal Navy, There is no bias at the Washington Post. Absolutely none. And when I say there is none, I do mean that there is a certain amount.

But in both cases, necrophilia is still right out. Even at the Egyptian branch office.

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And now for news of fresh Blue State disaster, both home and abroad.

But first, some background. Back in 2010, Theodore Dalrymple explored the revival of centralized economic planning in general, and the fortunes of its most prominent 20th proponent, John Kenneth Galbraith, specifically:

His books sold by the million and were available everywhere in cheap paperback editions; titles such as American Capitalism and The Affluent Society were known to almost all educated people. A teacher at Princeton, Cambridge, and Harvard, he was the editor for a time of Fortuneand the American ambassador to India. He was also the first economist to be widely known on television, not least through his sparring with William F. Buckley, Jr. (a close personal friend). His omnipresence as the voice of economics was both the result and the cause of a whole climate of opinion.

As is commonly the way, a reaction set in. Galbraith, who lived from 1908 to 2006, grew not only old, but old hat. His Keynesianism appeared outmoded in an era of unprecedented growth and prosperity apparently brought about by adherence to economic theories very different from his. No one believed any longer that demand management—the governmental regulation and, if necessary, provision of the demand for goods and services within the whole economy—was the way to combine prosperity with social justice. Rather, the market’s invisible hand and unconscious wisdom would lead us into the sunny uplands of expanding wealth and diminishing poverty.

But recently, there has been a reaction to the reaction. No sooner had Lehman Brothers collapsed than the printing presses started to roll out copies of Galbraith’s book on the debacle of 1929, The Great Crash. In fact, it couldn’t be printed fast enough, paperback books being affordable even in times of crisis. Galbraith was the hero of a recent PBS documentary extolling the value of big government. And demand management à la Galbraith is now back with a vengeance, of course. If the improvidently indebted but now impecunious private citizen won’t spend and thereby expand economic activity, the improvidently indebted but infinitely expandable government will do it for him.

So how’s that working out? Pretty badly, if these recent stories are any indication. First up, at Big Peace, founded by the late Andrew Breitbart, John J. Xenakis has this news of fresh disaster from Europe: “Spain Unemployment Near 25%; Britain Enters Double-Dip Recession”:

• Spain’s economy keeps spiraling downward as unemployment rises to 25%
• Switzerland considers paying illegal aliens to leave Switzerland
• Britain’s economy moves into a ‘double-dip’ recession
• Germany’s Angela Merkel angrily repudiates François Hollande’s campaign promises
• Greece’s elections driven by anti-austerity, anti-immigrant fervor
• Romania’s government collapses, Czech government survives, in anti-austerity anger

While President Reagan was working to expand entrepreneurship in the US in the 1980s, statist-oriented economists trumpeted the top-down economy of Japan as the better model — recall ’80s and early ’90s era-films such as Gung Ho, Black Rain, and Rising Sun. Two decades later,  Ross Douthat describes Japan as the “Incredible Shrinking Country,” facing demographic, and presumably economic, collapse as well, in the New York Times, and living out a real-life version of The Children of Men, PD James’ 1992 novel:

Japan is facing such swift demographic collapse, Eberstadt’s essay suggests, because its culture combines liberalism and traditionalism in particularly disastrous ways. On the one hand, the old sexual culture, oriented around arranged marriage and family obligation, has largely collapsed. Japan is one of the world’s least religious nations, the marriage rate has plunged and the divorce rate is higher than in Northern Europe.

Yet the traditional stigma around out-of-wedlock childbearing endures, which means that unmarried Japanese are more likely to embrace “voluntary childlessness” than the unwed parenting that’s becoming an American norm. And the traditional Japanese suspicion of immigration (another possible source for demographic vitality) has endured into the 21st century as well. Eberstadt notes that “in 2009 Japan naturalized barely a third as many new citizens as Switzerland, a country with a population only 6 percent the size of Japan’s and a reputation of its own for standoffishness.”

These trends are forging a society that sometimes evokes the infertile Britain in James’s dystopia. Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the developed world, and there were rashes of Internet-enabled group suicides in the last decade. Rental “relatives” are available for sparsely attended wedding parties; so-called “babyloids” — furry dolls that mimic infant sounds — are being developed for lonely seniors; and Japanese researchers are at the forefront of efforts to build robots that resemble human babies. The younger generation includes millions of so-called “parasite singles” who still live with (and off) their parents, and perhaps hundreds of thousands of the “hikikomori”—“young adults,” Eberstadt writes, “who shut themselves off almost entirely by retreating into a friendless life of video games, the Internet and manga (comics) in their parents’ home.”

And speaking of Japan and Europe, “Europe faces Japan syndrome as credit demand implodes,” Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes in the London Telegraph:

This slump in loan demand is more or less what happened during Japan’s Lost Decade as Mr and Mrs Watanabe shunned debt. Zero interest rates did nothing. The Bank of Japan was “pushing on a string” (though it never really launched bond purchases with any serious determination).

It is true that banks have slowed the pace of credit tightening, but they are nevertheless still tightening. “A banking crisis remains very much in play for much of the region,” said David Owen from Jefferies Fixed Income.

The credit squeeze is entirely predictable – and was widely predicted – given that banks must raise their core Tier 1 capital ratios to 9pc by July to meet EU rules, or face nationalisation. (The pro-cyclical folly of this beggars belief: by all means impose higher buffers, but not during a recession, and not by letting banks slash their balance sheets. The US at least forced its banks to raise capital, an entirely different policy since it does not lead to a lending crunch.)

The IMF said last week that Europe’s banks would slash their balance sheets by €2 trillion – or 7pc – by next year. This amounts to an economic shock. The Fund said deleveraging on this scale at a time of sharp fiscal tightening risks a “bad equilibrium”.

Indeed it does. It ensures hell for countries containing 200m people, or more. Judging by the rise of Sinn Fein, the Dutch Freedom Party, the Dutch Socialist Party (hard-Left), France’s Front National, and some true fire-breathers in Greece, they victims will not readily put up with this.

Oh well, what’s another potential “European Civil War” amongst friends and neighbors? Over on this side of the Atlantic, America’s Bluest of Blue regions are undergoing similar demographic and economic convulsions, as we’ll explore right after the page break.

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In his latest Best of the Web column, James Taranto proffers his choice for the winner of PJM’s recently announced contest:

Roger Simon of PJMedia.com announces the Walter Duranty Prize:

Walter Duranty–it will be recalled–was the New York Times’ Moscow correspondent in the 1920s and 1930s who whitewashed Joseph Stalin’s forced mass starvation of the Ukrainians (the Holodomor) and many other aspects of Soviet oppression.

Duranty was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his efforts. . . .

The first annual Duranty Prize will be given for what our readers consider the most egregious example of dishonest reporting for the fiscal year 2011-2012 (July 1, 2011-June 30, 2012).

We’d like to nominate Dan Rather. Yes, the dishonest reporting that made him infamous took place in 2004, but he has a new book out, “Rather Outspoken: My Life in the News,” whose official publication date is next Tuesday.

We’re lucky enough to have a copy, and we read part of Chapter 10, titled “Rather v. CBS.” Rather still claims that the fake documents on which he based the infamous report were genuine! Moreover, his writing is self-aggrandizing and just plain awful. Here’s his description of the courthouse where the proceedings in his failed lawsuit took place:

Inside there is a rotunda, with a huge WPA mural entitled Law through the Ages that covers the ceiling. The magisterial atmosphere of the courthouse extends into the courtroom itself. It looks exactly like you’d want a courtroom to look. It was a little tatty around the edges, showing the earmarks of the fiscal austerity of the times, but nonetheless still dignified. It was clearly a place for serious business, spare, almost spartan, but not quite: Judge Gammerman had made an effort to soften the severity of his courtroom by adding a few plants, an effort that unfortunately was not successful. The plants were droopy and anemic, perhaps because the chosen vegetation was never intended to spend its life indoors.

It didn’t matter.

Man, this writing is droopy and anemic!

While Dan should place rather (sorry about that) high in the running, arguably, the MSM’s collective meltdown over Trayvon Martin supersedes Dan’s efforts. Or as John Nolte wrote at the start of the month:

When it came to Rathergate, CBS was targeting a powerful public figure with the resources to fight back. With Editgate, three major networks have targeted a private citizen, a man who does not appear to be wealthy, who has not been charged with a crime, who is innocent until proven guilty, and who is currently in hiding with a bounty on his head.

Worse still, these malicious attempts to paint Zimmerman as a liar and racist are not only attacks on Zimmerman, but through the intentional enflaming of racial divisions based on false and half-baked information, this is also an attack on the American people–especially the people currently sitting in the front row in Sanford, FL.

After the investigation we all want to see, it may very well be discovered that George Zimmerman committed a crime. But if it comes out that he in fact did act in justifiable self-defense, he’ll probably have lawyers beating down his door for a piece of ABC, CNN, and NBC.

See also: Jewell, Richard:

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Don’t you hate it when backstage politics spill out and threaten to overtake the onstage politics that the MSM wishes to inflict upon us?

In a supposed discussion of financial ethics with left-wing Harvard professor Michael Sandel on Wednesday’s NBC Today, co-host Ann Curry decried people being able to pay more money to get through airport security faster: “…there’s an inherent unfairness to it….it’s about those with money having an easier life than those who don’t. And there’s something fundamentally unfair about that.”

If you say so, Ann:

Matt Lauer has signed a new, long-term deal with the “Today” show.  He will become way richer than he already is, and we’re told the next move will be to send Ann Curry packing.

As TMZ first reported, Lauer got close to his $30 million a year asking price, nearly doubling his $17 million a year current salary.

It’s bad news for Ann Curry, because our sources say Lauer does not want her as his co-host, and it appears her fate is now sealed.

NBC sources say Ann’s likely replacement will be Savannah Guthrie.

Last year, when Curry was tapped to replace Meredith Vieira as co-host of the Today Show, one Website reported the promotion “could take Curry’s $3 million annual salary up to anywhere between $5 million and $11 million.”

If TMZ’s report that Lauer wishes Curry out is true, and her bags are already packed, presumably she’ll be happy to move through the TSA line as fast as possible.

In more serious news at NBC, “Second Producer Quietly Fired in NBC’s EditGate:”

Supposedly this was all an accident.

And yet the same identical false edits were created both at NBC/NY HQ (for the Today show) and down at the NBC Miami affiliate.

An unnamed source at NBC6/Miami indicates that NBC really isn’t sorry at all:

“The network is very sensitive about the whole Al Sharpton/MSNBC issue, so when the right-wing bloggers started hammering, they needed to throw them fresh meat,” said the station source, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the controversy. “It’s not at all clear how this happened. Obviously, there was miscommunication.”

So NBC didn’t fire anyone because they thought they committed a firable offense — they just wanted to appease “right-wing bloggers” with some “fresh meat” due to their being “sensitive” about the “Al Sharpton/MSNBC issue.”

Funny how Ann and Matt seem to have little time to discuss the sort of “inherent unfairness” their parent network has inflicted on the man whom Jim Treacher dubs, “America’s latest Emmanuel Goldstein.”

(There will be more during the rolling two-minute hate between now and November.)

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