“The trailer for the new film produced by Citizens United and directed by Stephen K. Bannon. ‘Occupy Unmasked’ goes deep into the ‘Occupy’ movement and exposes its origins as well as the radical ideas behind ‘income inequality’ that has become the centerpiece of the Obama re-election effort.”
I have no idea whether or not Matthew Continetti’s new Washington Beacon will ultimately succeed, but he kicks it off with one helluva manifesto, which promises a little political jiu-jitsu. “What would happen,” Continetti asks, “if a website covered the left in the same way that the left covers the right?”
After hours listening to the drone of Brian Williams, Diane Sawyer, or Scott Pelley, one might conclude that America is a one-party state ruled by the GOP. But in fact the Republicans have controlled just one chamber of Congress for just one year, have been outspent by Democrats in the two most recent election cycles and are likely to be outspent in the current cycle, have drawn the ire and opposition of the 10 richest zip codes in the country, and have been so inept at shaping public opinion that one of America’s premier anti-cancer organizations had to backtrack when it decided to part ways with the country’s largest abortion provider.
Meanwhile, rather than tease out the connections between the big banks, unions, alternative energy companies, entrenched market incumbents, institutions such as the Center for American Progress and its Action Fund, and the policy apparatus of the Democratic Party, the press is far happier to mock Republicans as rubes and incompetents and to cover with relish Mitt Romney’s latest gaffe.
What would happen, though, if a website covered the left in the same way that the left covers the right? What picture of the world would one have in mind if the morning paper read like the New York Times—but with the subjects of the stories and the assumptions built into the text changed to reflect a conservative, not liberal, worldview? What would happen if the media wolf pack suddenly had to worry about an aerial hunting operation?
You are about to find out. The Washington Free Beacon is here to enter the arena of combat journalism. Our talented staff will add to the chorus of enterprising conservative reporters, publishing original stories, seeking out scoops, and focusing on the myriad connections between money and power in the progressive movement and Obama’s Washington. Our research and war room divisions will supplement that reporting with context, additional materials, and breaking video. At the Beacon, you will find the other half of the story, the half that the elite media have taken such pains to ignore: the inside deals, cronyism cloaked in the public interest, and far-out nostrums of contemporary progressivism and the Democratic Party. At the Beacon, all friends of freedom will find an alternative to the hackneyed spin, routine misstatements, paranoid hyperbole, and insipid folderol of Democratic officials and the liberal gasbags on MSNBC and talk radio. At the Beacon, we follow only one commandment: Do unto them.
Hey remember all that hypocritical BS a year ago by an MSM railing against war and gun-related imagery? I think Continetti just told the MSM to shove it all up their lavalier mics.
And the timing of his new Website couldn’t be better, as an otherwise unrelated post by Peter Robinson makes clear today at Ricochet:
As recently as this past Friday, I would still have said that the single, overriding issue in this election year would be the economy. Yet in the past 100 hours, Planned Parenthood and its pro-choice supporters in the press have savaged the Komen Foundation; the Obama administration, which might easily have backed down from its regulations forcing Catholic health care institutions to provide contraceptives in direct violation of Catholic teaching, has instead mounted a public relations offensive to insist upon its position; and the Ninth Circuit has ruled unconstitutional California’s Proposition 8, issuing its decision in language so self-righteous and so bald that it could only have been intended to insult the millions of Californians who supported the ballot measure.
As Peter writes, “Already the highest in a generation, the stakes in this election have just risen.” It would nice if the right had anything approaching parity with old media and the establishment left. Perhaps a more pugilistic tone might be a good first start.
Related: “And what is true of liberal politics is also true of liberal public policy, Jonah Goldberg writes in USA Today. “As the Obama administration has made clear to the Catholic Church, there is no neutrality, no safe harbor from liberalism’s moral vision. You’re either with us, or against us — which means we shall be against you.”
“The Sun says tweets and blogs threaten future of paper,” the Financial Times breathlessly reports:
Online news sources such as Twitter and celebrity-focused blogs could put newspapers like The Sun out of business, its editor told a parliamentary committee on Thursday.
Dominic Mohan said that if such sites were able to report scandals that newspapers were forbidden to write about because of privacy injunctions, readers and advertising money could flow from the press to the internet.
Mr Mohan told the privacy and injunctions committee of peers and MPs: “We are competing for eyeballs with social media.”
Needless to say, this isn’t exactly breaking news.
The Washington Times reports their former editor, who was also an advisor and press secretary to Newt Gingrich during the heady Contract With America days has passed away:
Tony Blankley, a noted conservative author and commentator and former editorial page editor of The Washington Times, died Sunday morning, according to family sources. He was 63 and had been battling stomach cancer.
Mr. Blankley was an executive vice president of the Edelman public-relations firm in Washington, a visiting senior fellow in national-security communications at the Heritage Foundation, a syndicated newspaper columnist and an on-air political commentator for CNN, NBC and NPR.
He was also a regular weekly guest on “The McLaughlin Group.”
Mr. Blankley was editorial page editor of The Times from 2002 to 2007, and from 1990 to 1997 he served as press secretary and general adviser to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
At the of the post is an interview Blankley gave to our Maximum Pajamhadeen during the early days of PJM’s existence.
Back in early 1999 or so, I first had my cable modem installed, which was branded at the time with the logo of @Home, then later by AT&T, and now Comcast – and I may be forgetting an interim broadband provider or ten along the way. Web surfing immediately became fun, fast, cheap and with unlimited access, no longer a nasty, brutish, slow, and expensive Hobbesian proposition. I immediately started searching online for Websites that went against the grain of the MSM. You young kids on the Web today may not believe this, but back then, in those Paleolithic pre-Blogosphere days, there weren’t that many choices. If I’m remembering correctly, there was basically:
At least, that’s where I spent the bulk of my time surfing for political news and opinion, until I discovered someone calling himself an “Instapundit,” who had linked to an article I had written for National Review Online. That was in early September of 2001, only a few days before the world changed. I have a lot of respect for those early Websites and organizations that were willing to buck the establishment. They were the first to “think different” – as a popular ad campaign advised us all to do back then, while espousing perfect conventional wisdom sorts of figures – in the period before Weblogs made publishing on the Internet available to everyone. (Including me; I didn’t start blogging until March of 2002, and up until about 1999 or so, I was writing almost exclusively for that quaint medium called “dead tree.”)
So, I’m certainly honored to both once again be included in Doug Ross’s “Fabulous 50” list for the second year in a row, this time winning “The Bozell Award for Best Media Pundit.” Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center and the even older Accuracy in Media were calling the MSM on their leftwing bias back when the World Wide Web was just a gleam in Al Gore’s eye.
Will I make it again for 2012? If not, it certainly won’t be for a lack of material, as the MSM promises to throw everything including the kitchen sink at whoever the GOP presidential candidate turns out to be. It’ll be a Dresden-like carpet bombing campaign by the media, to coin an MSNBC-approved metaphor.
And beyond that? Well, back in 1998, when actor Ving Rhames (from Pulp Fiction and the Mission: Impossible movie franchise) won a Golden Globe for playing Don King in a made-for-TV-movie, he immediately handed the award over to Jack Lemmon and said, “I feel that being an artist is about giving, and I’d like to give this to you.” The two immediately received a standing ovation from the audience. Maybe if I keep at this blogging thing for a few more decades, I’ll be able to hand over the Ed Driscoll Award for Best Media Pundit to Brent Bozell. In the meantime, a big thanks to Doug for the award, and for everyone for stopping by over the years – particularly since this coming March will mark our tenth anniversary in the Blogosphere.
Back in October, even as Paul Krugman was claiming a close institutional kinship between his newspaper and Occupy Wall Street (leading James Taranto to dub them “Krugman’s Army”), Kate Zernike, his fellow Timesperson was writing an article with this unintentionally* hilarious passage:
So far, most Americans do not align with either movement. In a USA Today/Gallup poll taken last weekend, 26 percent of those polled said they were supporters of the Occupy movement, while 19 percent identified as opponents, and 52 percent said they neither supported nor opposed it. Meanwhile, 22 percent said they were supporters of the Tea Party, 27 percent said they were opponents, and 47 percent said they were neither.
But the large majority — 63 percent — said they did not know enough about the Occupy goals to say whether they approved or disapproved. In the early days of the Tea Party movement, a similarly large percentage did not know much about it.
Conservatives are trying to define the Occupy protesters before the protesters define themselves.
Gee, as opposed to the MSM going all out from the very moment the Tea Party first appeared on the national scene to define them as heavily-armed racist neo-Nazi reactionaries? But the MSM failed in their task in 2009 — despite throwing everything at the Tea Party — and as John Nolte wrote last week at Big Journalism, they’ve failed in their efforts as painting OWS in pastel United Colors of Benetton shades — to the point where they’re attempting to airbrush very recent history:
[T]he Left and their media allies didn’t expect New Media to own this story and to use the truth to drive the narrative out of their control. And we know they didn’t expect to lose this one because almost every prominent Democrat in America very publicly jumped aboard the Occupy movement with the expectation that their allies in the MSM could control the outcome.
Well, now Democrats like Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi are way out on a limb and have been caught in bed encouraging, endorsing, and attempting to legitimize a wildly unpopular movement most voters now find repulsive.
So what’s a shameless left-wing media to do?
What they always do. Rewrite history.
And it looks as thought the Associated Press has decided to start the memory-holing with the following:
Democrats See Minefield in Occupy Protests
NEW YORK (AP) — The Republican Party and the tea party seemed to be a natural political pairing. But what may have seemed like another politically beneficial alliance — Democrats and Occupy Wall Street — hasn’t happened.
Insert record scratch here.
Sorry AP, but the only reason Democrats see a minefield is because they’re standing in it.
Democrats such as…
…House Democrats. And look, the story about House Democrats endorsing Occupy is an AP story!
…A President named Obama, who said of Occupy, “We are on their side.”
…The SEIU.
Need I go on?
When the AP matter-of-factly (the most effective way to propagandize) states that this natural alliance “hasn’t happened” … they are lying.
Today at Big Journalism, Kurt Schlichter explores the Occupy movement’s next phase, and charts a response to continue the left’s Epic Occufail:
As we found during the BlogCon 2011 convention, the Occupiers are uniquely vulnerable to mockery. By grabbing victim status, they hope to avoid the derision that they so richly deserve– which threatens them more than anything else. The key to their success is to be taken seriously as a political movement. By mercilessly pointing out their failures, foibles and felonies, we out-Alinsky the Alinskyites by utterly depriving the Occupiers of any ability to connect in a meaningful way with significant numbers of normal people.
No one wants to be part of a bunch of losers. If we keep showing normal Americans that’s exactly what the Occupiers are, the Occupiers will fail. Phase II – the Innocent Victims of the Fascist Police State Phase – is designed to reset the narrative that the Occupiers have lost control of largely because of people like us. We can’t let that happen. These people are clowns, and we need to spread the word.
It’s not time to wind down but to wind up, to get out there in the alternative media and through social media – and through personal, one-on-one contact with non-politically active people – and make the truth known. The Occupiers are a bunch of losers. If they don’t want to get pepper sprayed, they ought to stop doing the kind of things that get people pepper sprayed. And we conservatives stand with the cops. Liberals, who are you with – us and the cops, or with the guy with the Che t-shirt, Guy Fawkes mask and STD?
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but in this information battle, our pictures and our words telling the truth and providing context are priceless.
Read the whole thing.
Related: “If you want to see a revealing look at the emotional, and not simply political, investment liberals have in the Occupy Wall Street Movement, watch Mika Brzezinski and Jeffrey Sachs respond to Newt Gingrich’s comments over the weekend that the protesters should get a job and take a bath. Their rage is uncontained, almost tear-inducing, and comical. The whole crew and conversation, with one liberal egging on the other, is a fantastic window into the dominant mindset of modern-day liberal journalists.”
– H.L. Mencken, c. 1942.
– The late Deborah Howell, then the Post’s ombudswoman, November 14, 2008.
– Byron York, the Washington Examiner, July 20th, 2010.
– Evan Thomas in Newsweek, then still owned by the Washington Post, March 1st, 2008, in “The Myth of Objectivity,” an article whose subhead claims, “Is the mainstream press unbiased? No, but we aren’t ideological.”
No, of course not:
“When the dean of Columbia Journalism School whips out a camera to take your picture…” Kathy Shaidle notes, “Just wow.” O’Keefe is deep, deep inside the heads of “objective” journalists who just love having their century-old tactics thrown back at them.
I started out on Photoshop in the early naughts, fumbling my through the program and using it for basic photo editing. A minor breakthrough came in 2005, when I submitted some Photoshopped images of Hugh Hewitt’s Blog book in various strange places. This was for a Fark-like Photoshop contest that Hugh’s producer Generalissimo Duane held, and I ended up placing Hugh’s book on Lawrence of Arabia’s desk, being bandied about by the pioneering multimedia journalists of the New York Inquirer, and being promoted by Capt. Kirk and Mr. Spock:
A few years later, when I began to produce my Silicon Graffiti videos, an unanticipated side benefit is that I found myself using Photoshop more and more to produce artwork to go into the videos, including on the monitors in the virtual set behind me. If you watch the shot that begins here of a mushroom cloud followed by photos of various dictators, everything behind me, including the virtual set, is a single Photoshop .PSD file, with various layers animated in Adobe’s Premiere Pro to appear in sequence, timed to an ancient British Cinesound explosion sound effect.)
However, producing artwork for PJM, including many of the 85X85 pixel thumbnails on the PJM homepage greatly accelerated my learning curve. Around Christmas of 2009, while visiting the now sadly closed Borders bookstore in Santana Row, I came across Art and Design in Photoshop: How to simulate just about anything from great works of art to urban graffiti. While a fair amount of political correctness and left-wing sucker punches (including a demonic Reagan Photoshop parody) mars the book, there’s a lot to be gleaned from it. As its subtitle implies, the book walks the reader through how to recreate everything from old movie posters to food and toy packaging to Mondrian, Roy Lichtenstein, and other pop art images.
I also found a slightly older title, Photoshop Classic Effects: The Essential Effects Every User Needs to Know, which I purchased later, to be an excellent learning guide. (The one thing I miss about the local Borders closing is being able to browse through books such as these to see which ones viscerally grab me. If it’s love at first sight, I’m much more likely to spend hours in the book, rather than a how-to guide I feel like I’m pulling teeth to learn from.)
And so from those books, and a lot of trial and error, here are some of the better images I’ve produced over the last few years.
This image of President Obama in his plus-fours, inspired by a quip by Mark Steyn, grew out of a shot of Donald Sutherland in Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, and was bordered by a Polaroid Photoshop brush plug-in, which James Lileks referred me to:
This Salvador Dali parody was produced following the instructions in the aforementioned Art and Design in Photoshop. I just replaced the melting clocks with similarly dissipated Obama logos:
Last fall, when Obama became obsessed with his sippin’ Slurpees metaphor, this was a natural, which I used for a time as my Twitter avatar. It’s just the hat artwork that Stacy Tabb produced for my blog’s masthead back in 2004 on top of an existing 7-11 Slurpee ad, on top of a default Photoshop gradient layer. The shadows and reflection at the bottom were cribbed from the instructions in Photoshop Classic Effects:
Having been one of those legendary 45,000 people who bought the Velvet Underground’s first album shortly before forming his own rock group, this parody for a Zombie blog post’s thumbnail, when former VU drummer Mo Tucker supported the Tea Party last year, was a natural:
I had lots of fun parodying MSNBC’s silly “Lean Forward” ads in the fall of 2010. This one, created when Olbermann was still earning a paycheck from General Electric proved to be strangely prophetic…
When it was obvious that their party was going to lose Congress last year, and a majority of Americans disapproved of the Ground Zero Mosque, the MSM really teed off on their customers. This was my response to a bitter and punitive Time magazine cover late in the summer of 2010:
In 2009 or so, I purchased some Photoshop templates from Digital Juice for use in both videos, and as stand-alone artwork. I spent a pleasant half an hour or so putting this one together one Saturday last year:
This one I think I did around Christmas of 2009. It took quite a while to copy and paste, and line-up the text to produce this Spinal Tap-inspired image, which appeared in a Silicon Graffiti video on media bias, and an item here and during a stint guest-hosting on Hot Air.com about studying the Washington Post (then Newsweek’s owners) Kremlinologist-style.
This image was for a thumbnail for a post last year by Richard Fernandez called “Gone with the Wind.” For most of these images, I start big, and then use Photoshop’s “Save To Web” feature to reduce the images down to an 80 or 85 pixels square jpeg. I always save the layers in their original size as a Photoshop file, since you never know when you’ll need a larger image, or want to modify the image into something else. For obvious reasons, I’m hoping to reuse this image right around this time next year:
This was for a Victor Davis Hanson post last year on Obama’s poll numbers going into freefall. I wonder how many people have looked at this, and assumed it was simply a skydiver promoting Obama in 2008? I took an existing photo of a skydiver, tilted his angle to make him appear more out of control, and then placed the Obama logo on top of his ‘chute. I cut the various colors of the Obama logo into different layers, and then set the blending options on each layer to different settings, and different degrees of transparency, to make it appear as if the whole thing was blended into the fabric of the parachute. A fair amount of work, but the end result was pretty effective, I thought:
Finally, another image for a VDH post, this one from last month on “The Coming Post-Obama Renaissance,” and really well received. (The lads on Trifecta even mentioned it on PJTV.) It’s a photo of Obama heading for Marine One, with the sky clipped out, and a glorious sunrise pasted in underneath. I tried to visually convey the message of VDH’s post: When BHO is no longer POTUS, it will be Morning in America once again:
Interesting clip from James O’Keefe, built around some sort of recent panel discussion by Clay Shirky and Jay Rosen, both NYU media professors. Rosen once wrote quite perceptive pieces on the media in the mid-naughts, but was last seen here having Andrew Breitbart occupying a fair amount of the real estate in his cerebral cortex. Ace of Spades has a nice rundown on the clip, particularly on the portion that focuses on the New York Times’ early coverage of Obama:
Clay Shirky discusses the issue of bias in coverage, and how it’s done.
Regarding Obama in 2006 and 2007, he notes — at this point in time, at least — there really was no very credible reason to cover Obama seriously. He was a little-known very inexperienced freshman Senator. And black. The odds of him becoming President were less than 100:1.
And yet the Times realized (correctly) that he could be a viable candidate. But that itself is not supposed to be news; that is, the Times can’t “create the news” with a headline like:
Thirty Out of Thirty-Two New York Times Editors Agree: Obama Would Be A Good Democratic Candidate
Now that’s actually what they want to say. That is, in fact, the news: that a major influence-leading liberal news organization is impressed by a liberal politician (and so of course will be giving him favorable coverage in the future).
But they can’t say that, because supposedly they’re not liberal (wink) and because they are supposed to report the news made by others, not report the “news” of their own beliefs and opinions.
So what do they do? They begin covering stuff like Obama Girl, noting the cultural phenomenon of Barack Obama (which wasn’t really a phenomenon when they began treating it as such). Without expressly running a story with the headline, Reliably Left-Liberal News Organization Has Decided To Give Barack Obama Favorable Coverage Because They Like Him, that was in fact what was going on, as evidenced by their choice to elevate a little-known freshman Senator into Someone You The Reader Should Be Taking Seriously Because All These Smart People (Not Us!) Are Taking Him Seriously.
And of course, the first viral video clip on Obama was created by the Obama camp itself, responding to Hillary’s safe, lame “I’m starting a dialogue” first video in early 2007:
And once the snowball began rolling downhill, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Also in the clip, Shirky and Rosen discuss the NYT’s happy, shiny coverage of Occupy Wall Street — up close and personal in more ways than one.
Yes, I realize you could fill whole books with the subject of that headline, but let’s look at one story in particular. I started to get slightly huffy over this passage on Occupy Wall Street in the New York Times…
There is a through-the-looking glass element to some of the criticism. The Daily Caller reported that based on photographs, the Occupy forces were almost exclusively white (numerous studies and polls have shown the Tea Party, too, has proportionately few members of minority groups).
The Tea Party, too, was vague about its frustrations in its early days, or contradictory, as in the sign at one rally that was cited as evidence that the Tea Party itself was uneducated and uninformed: “Keep Your Government Hands Off My Medicare.”
At Tea Party protests you could find the kind of one-off cranks that conservatives have found at Occupy rallies — Tea Party organizers would explain them as fringe-y interlopers. (Those Obama-as-Hitler posters, they noted, were the work of Lyndon LaRouche supporters, not Tea Party activists.)…
Conservatives are trying to define the Occupy protesters before the protesters define themselves.
Ed Morrissey, writing in The Week, insisted that the Occupy movement wants “seizures and redistributions, which necessarily means more bureaucracies, higher spending, and many more opportunities for collusion between authorities and moneyed interests in one way or another.”
…And then I realized it was by Kate Zernike, who presumably is still smarting from being called out (“pwned” as the kids on the Interwebs are wont to say) by Andrew Breitbart at CPAC in February of 2010 after her attempt to smear conservative journalist Jason Mattera* and the rest of the CPAC attendees as racists:
Kate Zernike of the New York Times, are you in the room? Are you in the room? You’re despicable. You’re a despicable human being. You’re the New York Times. What is your headline here? You came to CPAC to get your prey and here’s your prey, Jason Mattera from HotAir and also from Young America’s Foundation. This is the headline: CPAC Speaker Bashes Obama, comma, in Racial Tones.
And also by Glenn Reynolds a few months later:
Kate Zernike of the New York Times describes how tea-party activists explore “dusty bookshelves for long-dormant ideas” and study “once-obscure texts” by “long-dead authors.” She is of course referring to Friedrich Hayek, whose book The Road to Serfdom was excerpted in Reader’s Digest and never has been out of print, whose Nobel Prize for economics in 1972 celebrated the importance and mainstream acceptance of his thinking, and whose death in 1992 isn’t exactly ancient history.
If they didn’t learn it in college, it’s “obscure.” Which, alas, merely highlights the inadequacy of their educations. (I, on the other hand, took a semester-long seminar on Hayek in college.) At any rate, the “obscure” Road to Serfdom is currently #56 on Amazon.
Related: Stuart Schneiderman: Who’s Smarter Now?
UPDATE: Reader Michael Costello writes: “How long has Karl Marx been dead? And Friedrich Hayek outlived Saul Alinsky by 20 years.”
ANOTHER UPDATE: OUCH:
If I had said a day ago that your typical New York Times reporter doesn’t have the vaguest sense of what the rule of law means, I would have heard from all sorts of earnest liberal readers — and probably some conservative ones too – about how I was setting up a straw man. But now we know it’s true. It’s not just that she doesn’t know what it is, it’s that even after (presumably) looking it up, she still couldn’t describe it and none of her editors raised an eyebrow when she buttered it.
The claims of superior intellect on the part of the legacy media seem unfounded.
Regarding Zernike’s story on OWS, I love this notion of conservatives “trying to define the Occupy protesters before the protesters define themselves.” How does a movement not define itself before it starts? The Tea Partiers were very specific: stop spending, stop the bailouts, and once ObamaCare began to metastasize, stop that as well. Protests in the 1960s were highly specific as well: more civil rights for black Americans, let South Vietnam get clobbered by the North end the Vietnam War. How is it that Occupy Wall Street couldn’t articulate a similarly straightforward message?
But as far as actually defining the Occupy protesters, sorry, but the MSM established the baseline in early 2009. A CNN anchorman told his viewers that “It’s hard to talk when your teabagging.” One of his colleagues — holding herself out as an objective, in the field journalist — interjected herself into the story, arguing with the protestors about their motives. A prominent General Electric spokesman questioned the racial makeup of the Tea Party, and then refused an invitation to attend himself proffered by numerous minority tea partiers. The MSM set the baseline; they shouldn’t be surprised that the conservative Blogosphere returns the volley. And while the left sees OWS, the difference between two movements spotlight why there’s been so much bad press this time around: Tea Partiers general gathered in a single area, listened to speeches — and then went home to their jobs and families. For OWS, whether it’s NYT-approved trust fund babies or 38-year old moms who’ve chucked their lives to camp out in a park, spending 24/7 in squalor will only increase the odds that somebody will meltdown and do something stupid — particularly given the ubiquity of social media (which the left championed as a key tool during the 2006 elections.)
As Jonah Goldberg wrote in 2005, while gathering the material that would become Liberal Fascism:
Liberals are geniuses at unleashing social panics because A) it never occurs to them that their motives are anything but pure and B) because they are almost exclusively focused on short term tactics. And yet they are invariably shocked when these moral frenzies come back to bite them. McCarthyism was a direct consequence of both the Red Scare and the Brown Scare. And when the tactics they mastered were turned on them, they acted as if they came from nowhere.
Which brings us back to the beginning of our post.
* Who unlike Zernike punches above his institution’s weight.
Related: “I confess, I haven’t been to any tea-party rallies so you’ll have to tell me: Are there a lot of ‘here’s what to do if you’re raped today’ fliers circulating at those too?”
I predict a tectonic shift among American Jews and within the Democratic Party if Obama doesn’t quietly retire. All the spinning in the world can’t spin away the trend of Scott Brown, the Tea Party victory of November 2010, and now the Turner earthquake.
Many Democrats are awakening to the reality that their party has been hijacked by a radicalism completely unfamiliar to their parents’ and grandparents’ Democratic Party.
An internal, partisan civil war is now brewing in that party. What I think tonight is less important than what Joe Lieberman, Bill Clinton, Evan Bayh, and the rest of the former, and now defunct, reasonable wing of the Democratic Party is thinking tonight.
– Andrew Breitbart, Anthony Weiner’s blog noire.
“GOP wins in NY House race, seen as Obama rebuke,” reads this dull as dishwater AP headline. Linking to it, Matt Drudge reminds us why, as Don Surber recently wrote, he remains America’s News Editor:
At Hot Air, with Republican Mark Amodei currently up by 20 points in Nevada, Allahpundit releases the beloved Humbot.
Advice columnist Penelope Trunk, dubbed “the world’s most influential guidance counselor” by Inc. Magazine has some suggestions for those who wish to write for a living:
The way you get a job as an online journalist is that you show you can write and get traffic. So first, get sites to let you write for them, and then, after you are doing one blog post/article a week for various web sites. You will do this by pitching and networking, and writing a lot on spec.
Then start thinking about how to quantify to employers that you are writing GOOD stuff online. The way you do this is by saying you got x number of comments, or x number of twitter links to your post, or things like that that are ways to quanitify that your post got traffic.
There are TONS of jobs for writing online, but you have to prove you know how to write online in order to get them.
You absolutely must stop thinking of yourself as a print journalist because there are no jobs. This means that all the rules you learned in print journalism don’t apply to how your are going to get a job. You need to read TONS of blogs [so that] you start getting a feel for how people are writing for blogs and what gets a lot of traffic.
You should also start your own blog. That is your real resume. If you want a job writing online, any employer will say “Why aren’t you doing it now if that’s what you want to do?” And it’s a decent question. No one is stopping you from writing right now. You don’t need to be paid to write something good. Just write it and put it on your blog. Your blog doesn’t need to get a lot of traffic. It just needs to be there when an employer wants to see what you can do.
Now, if you also want to be a pundit, then don’t miss Andrew Klavan’s easy to follow recommendations as well:
And if you want to disseminate news that also reaches the port side of the Blogosphere, you might to employ the “Made You Look” news distribution system.
And now, a few words on the long-term dangers of deficit spending, from a rather unlikely source:
(Correct me if I’m wrong, but he wasn’t too crazy about President Bush’s foreign policy, either. Go figure.)
On his personal blog, after linking to the above clip, Moe Lane writes about a topic I’ve explored a few times myself over the years. Back in 2006, I dubbed it “The Internet Immortality Thesis,” a sort of corollary of Mickey Kaus’s beloved Feiler Faster Principle. Linking to the above clip, Moe notes that while we take YouTube and other video aggregation sites for granted today, YouTube itself was only founded in February of 2005.
This means that the 2004 presidential campaign was the last more or less fought under the old rules of battle, with strategies largely dictated by the MSM. John Kerry’s campaign was the last to play under the old rules of the game, and he paid for it dearly. Even without YouTube, the Blogosphere devoured him, thanks to his Radical Chic past. As I wrote right around this time seven years ago (my how time flies on the Internet), Kerry’s campaign was very much “Built for a 1972 Media:”
Kerry’s massively invented narrative (“swashbuckling Swift Boat lieutenant”–as Steyn describes him–turned brave defender of soldiers’ rights) was built to survive the glancing scrutiny (if you can call it that) of a 1972-era media that consisted of three TV networks with half hour evening news shows, and a few liberal big city newspapers, all of which were staffed with journalists more or less largely sympathetic to Kerry’s leftist anti-American beliefs.
But between the Swift Boat Vets and the Blogosphere, there are far too many people examining Kerry’s story, and his “reporting for duty” edifice has crumbled.
Is that fair? We’ll, we’re deciding if we want the man to have the key to the most powerful arsenal ever assembled. If he can’t survive the scrutiny of the Blogosphere, who James Lileks recently described as an “obsessive sort with lots of time on their hands”, is he someone who should be trusted with this power?
The 1972-style media seems to think so.
When Joe Biden described Obama in early 2007 as “clean,” what he meant, once you translated the typically painful Biden-ese into English, was that Obama didn’t have the same sort of radical chic paper trail that could come back to bite him in the Barack as other previous black leftwing presidential candidates. (See also: Sharpton, Al.) The appearance of Rev. Wright and Bill Ayers began to complicate Obama’s narrative, but Obama’s handlers, the JournoList, the complicit MSM, and the financial meltdown all helped to clobber a sclerotic and supine McCain campaign that was terrified of being branded racist. (Well over four years of this slash and burn tactic by the left have greatly devalued the potency of the scarlet-R, but then, short-term tactics often blind the left to their more permanent implications.)
Everybody has their story of how they discovered the Blogosphere; for lots of people, it was via Instapundit.com, which turned ten years old this week. Here’s my take, a visit to the Jurassic days of the early Blogosphere.
Ten years ago, when I was making my living as a freelance writer, and writing four to six articles a month to magazines in various fields — back then mostly “on dead tree,” I had only just started to write for political Websites. I had submitted an article on the Mies van der Rohe exhibition then ongoing at New York’s Museum of Modern Art to National Review Online, and then followed up with an article on the Computer History Museum, then at Moffett Field in northern California. I was always doing Google vanity searches on my name, to see who was linking to my articles online.
Shortly after the piece on the Computer History Museum went up at NRO, I found it had been linked to by something or someone called “Instapundit.” I had seen Weblogs before, but they were always of the “I went to the mall and bought a great pair of Nikes” or “I had a really great date at Applebee’s last night” variety of daily diaries.
And I had seen self-published e-zines, in the form of Virginia Postrel’s Dynamist.com, KausFiles, and maybe Andrew Sullivan in whatever incarnation he was then currently in, plus of course the self-published Drudge Report, and had thought about launching a Website of my own, but these looked like they were beyond my then-meager Web skills. Designing a page template? FTP’ing up new pages every day? I didn’t know of any programs that automated that sort of thing.
But what set Instapundit apart, at the time, was that it was on Blogger. In fact, as Glenn Reynolds mentions in his new video at PJTV celebrating the tenth anniversary of his pioneering blog, his original URL was indeed instapundit.blogspot.com.That little Blogger Button in the corner of Glenn’s Weblog made all the difference. It suddenly became obvious that the platform of Blogger.com and the content it held were two very different things. While the vast majority of blogs on Blogger.com’s Blogspot hosting site were daily diaries, in reality, a blog could be anything.
And it helped that Glenn picked a catchy name for his nascent enterprise. As marketing gurus Al Ries and Jack Trout once wrote, there’s reason why we remember Apple as the first personal computer, and not the Altair 8800 or the IMSAI 8080. Because Apple had the name that made computing sound simple, easy to learn, and reliable, and not something you needed Wehner von Braun and Stanley Kubrick to walk you through. Similarly, the name Instapundit instantly explained the purpose of this new Website. Want news? Want opinion? What it fast? Who doesn’t, in the age of the World Wide Web? Well, this is your Website.
Once I saw the short “hit and run” style of Instapundit, the light bulb went off for me, as it did for hundreds, possibly thousands of other would-be bloggers back then: you could point readers to a story, and interject a short comment, but you needn’t hold yourself out as an expert on a particular topic. You were essentially an Internet traffic cop, directing traffic to the hot story of the moment, and blowing the whistle on those stories were the journalist got it wrong. And unlike a magazine article, which typically is of a fixed word count to fit into an existing page space in-between advertisements, a blog post could be any length, as we’ve seen from Glenn’s short one sentence (occasionally even one word) posts, to 5,000 word essays that Steven Den Beste routinely used to post in the first half of the previous decade. Or a blog could be devoted primarily to photos or video.
In other words, it was immediately obvious there was a whole new freeform style that had opened up, when I clicked on Instapundit around September 3rd or 4th of 2001.
And then the next week, the world changed. As Bryan Preston writes at the Tatler:
It’s hard to believe it’s been 10 years since Glenn Reynolds started InstaPundit.com. His blog was the first I ran across in the chaos of 9-11, and I was instantly hooked by his calm, reasonable, patriotic and liberty-focused take on the horrors of that day, and he way and speed with which he assembled opinion and reaction from all over the world. The way he dissected and destroyed media memes was a lifeline to sanity. InstaPundit was a revelation to me. Later I would start my own blog, JunkYardBlog, inspired and led by Glenn’s work. Thousands of other bloggers out there have been similarly impacted and inspired by Glenn Reynolds, and millions of readers have too. Glenn Reynolds is the blogfather to the blogosphere itself, among the right and libertarian blogs.
Right from the start, Glenn’s list of permalinked Weblogs were worth clicking on in and of themselves, just to see who was out there in this new world of journalism.
In early 2002, as I was planning to launch Ed Driscoll.com, originally simply to promote my magazine articles, I decided to use the Blogger.com interface to allow for easy access of the site, but with a different color scheme to differentiate myself from Glenn. (The hat design, based on a Trilby I had picked up in London in the summer of 2000, and swanky ’50s font came a couple of years later, when I commissioned Stacy Tabb to update my Weblog.)
Steve Hayward of Power Line proffers “a suggestion for the Tea Party and their sympathizers: Since Reuters and other establishment media types embrace the moral relativism of the ‘one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’ nonsense, why not hoist them with their own petard, and start referring to ‘Tea Party freedom fighters?’ It will enable Krugman and Down to phone in yet another column.”
Heh.™
Related: Jonathan S. Tobin of Commentary on “From Tea to Terror: The Roots of Demonization.”
Ann Althouse calls them Drudgtapositions; she’s had lots of fun analyzing the subtexts and semiotics of Drudge’s photos and headline juxtapositions. The cropping of the photo that’s currently up on the Drudge Report is particularly fascinating: Obama, walking away, back to the camera, ready to board the helicopter off on yet another vacation and/or fundraiser, with word “United” above him. Is Drudge saying that America is united in seeking the president’s defeat or his resignation? He’s walking towards the left; like Carter, he’ll be free to rhetorically move even further to the left once he’s out of office. The image certainly recalls Nixon’s final walk towards Marine One, and the final “V For Victory” (or was a hippie-style peace symbol?) on his way towards his post presidential-life:
The thought of Obama resigning? The thought of Obama as Nixon? Heaven forfend!
Related: “Will Obama Be Primaried? Ralph Nader Believes So; A Former Obama Supporter Hopes So.”
Richard Cohen of the Washington Post is none too happy with the Tea Party, and he’s not afraid to let the world know it:
The odd thing about the Tea Party is that it uses Washington to attack Washington. This is a version of Hannah Arendt’s observation that totalitarian movements use democratic institutions to destroy democracy. (This is what Islamic radicals will do in Egypt.) Note that the Tea Party is nowhere near a majority — not in the House and not in the Senate. Its followers have only 60 seats in the 435-member House, but in a textbook application of political power they were able to use parliamentary rules to drive the congressional agenda. As we have known since Lenin’s day, a determined minority is hands down better than an irresolute majority.
The Tea Party has recklessly diminished the power and reach of the United States. It has shrunk the government and will, if it can, further deprive it of revenue. The domestic economy will suffer and the gap between rich and poor, the educated and the indolently schooled, will continue to widen. International relations will lack a dominant power able to enforce the rule of law, and the bad guys will be freer to be as bad as they want. Maybe the deficit will be brought under control, but nothing else will. I worry — and I envy (but will not forgive) those who don’t.
Why? None of that sounds too far removed from Barack Obama’s early stated goals as a presidential candidate:
First, I’ll stop spending $9 billion a month in Iraq. I’m the only major candidate who opposed this war from the beginning. And as president I will end it.
Second, I will cut tens of billions of dollars in wasteful spending.
I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems.
I will not weaponize space.
I will slow our development of future combat systems.
As Deborah Howell, the Post’s late ombudswoman wrote immediately after the election, perhaps anticipating her paper’s role in the JournoList scandal to come, “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.”
So why is Cohen against bipartisan support of the president’s agenda?
(Incidentally, nice bit of Orwellian doublethink to call the grass-roots, libertarian-oriented Tea Party “Totalitarian.” This has to be the first “Totalitarian” movement in the history of mankind that, if it gets everything it wants…will leave you the hell alone. Cohen’s freakout over this notion reminds me of another Hannah Arendt paraphrase.)
Rep. David Wu (D-OR) has announced that he’s resigning, although the caveat that he’ll do so after the debt crisis has concluded means that it could be remain office seemingly into perpetuity. Fortunately, in the meantime, Taiwan’s crack team of animators has summed up his peccadilloes in their usual idiosyncratic style — which is probably more accurate than the average New York Times reportage is these days:
Meanwhile, in news from the port side of the Senate, “Kerry’s Implacable Defender, and Man Who Introduced Him At 2004 Democratic National Convention, Stripped By Navy Of His Own Silver Star.”
Related: “‘Weirdo’ Wu Goes as Wayward Woo Woes Grow” — Walter Russell Mead has your New York Post-ready headline of the day, and a brief but perceptive reason why Wu wilted in Washington.
Mister, we’ve got a man like Jimmy Carter again! It’s been obvious since, oh, about the middle of 2008, but Laura Ingraham makes it official, as even center-left Mediaite is forced to note:
Today on The Laura Ingraham Show, host Laura Ingraham presented a remix, of sorts, juxtaposing portions of former President Jimmy Carter’s 1979 “Malaise Speech” (also known as his “Crisis of Confidence Speech” or, perhaps, his “Generally Terrible Stuff Speech”) with recent comments made by President Barack Obama.
The emphasis of both speeches used in the clip is on convincing Americans to scrimp, save and sacrifice during tough economic times. It’s like they say: The more things change, the more they stay the same. Depressing. I was really looking forward to blowing a lot of cash on Vegas.
Must not be much of an Obama fan, huh?
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