“Navy names littoral combat ship after Gabrielle Giffords,” the Chicago Tribune reports:

Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus announced Friday that the next Independence variant littoral combat ship will be named after Gabrielle Giffords, the former Arizona congresswoman who survived being shot in the head last January when a gunman opened fire as Giffords met with constituents outside a Tucson grocery store.

Six others, including nine-year-old Christina Taylor-Green, [and George H.W. Bush-appointed federal judge John M. Roll, whom the Tribune either forgot to mention, or doesn't want to include because it clutters the narrative -- Ed] were killed in the shooting and 13 others, including Giffords, were wounded.

Mabus said the ship’s sponsor will be Roxanna Green, Taylor-Green’s mother. In naval tradition, a ship’s sponsor’s “spirit and presence guide the ship throughout its service life,” according to a Defense Department statement.

Giffords was presented with an artist’s rendering of what will be the USS Gabrielle Giffords at a Pentagon ceremony Friday afternoon.

You can see an illustration of the ship here. Curiously, it isn’t powered by windmills, nor does the Tribune seemed too upset about the potentially inflammatory rhetoric tacit in the ship’s ultimate purpose.

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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.”

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At the DC Examiner, Charlie Spiering writes:

An obvious victim of CNN’s graphic-heavy election presentation, news anchor John King called Mitt Romney “Governor Mormon” last night, during coverage of the Nevada election results.

“If you look here among faith, obviously Governor Mormon is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.” King said. “He’s a Mormon and he also won big among Mormons.”

Romney won the vote of 9 out of 10 Mormons in Nevada.

“Bigotry will slip out,” Glenn Reynolds writes, clearly in nowhere near as charitable a mood as Spiering. Nor should he be. A year ago, King apologized on-air for a guest using the word “crosshairs,” which for a time was a temporarily-loaded word amongst King’s fellow left-leaning members of old media — even on one that for years hosted a show with an almost identical title:

On Tuesday’s John King USA, CNN’s John King issued a prompt on-air apology minutes after a guest on his program used the term “crosshairs” during a segment: “We’re trying to get away from using that kind of language” (audio available here). This action stands in stark contrast to an incident over a year earlier where former anchor Rick Sanchez took four days to apologize for using a unconfirmed quote attributed to Rush Limbaugh.

Since King himself set the standard, clearly, he must apologize for using his own similarly potentially inflammatory language or risk being called a hypocrite.

Well, again, especially given his network’s repeated penchant for religious bigotry.

Update: As a commenter asks below, does King ever refer to Harry Reid as “Senator Mormon?”

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From John Derbyshire:

The late Sam Francis gave us the invaluable term “anarcho-tyranny” to describe that state of society in which “we refuse to control real criminals (that’s the anarchy) so we control the innocent (that’s the tyranny).”

Britain is far gone in anarcho-tyranny. Among my Christmas mail were a card and letter from a relative we barely communicate with the rest of the year. To make up for her side of the delinquency, she sends us a nice chatty summary of all that’s happened to her large and bustling family in the previous twelve months.

As the Derb concludes, “Anarcho-tyranny: coming soon to a jurisdiction near you” — which we like to call around here, California.

As Victor Davis Hanson recently noted, “In the new pay-as-you-go state, shrouded in politically correct bureaucratese, Californians have developed a keen sense of cynicism. The scores of Highway Patrol cars that now dot our freeways are looking for the middle class — the minor, income-producing infractions of the generally law-abiding — inasmuch as in comparison the felonies of the underclass are lose–lose propositions.”

(Via Ace of Spades.)

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…Freedom is the freedom to say that 2 X 18 = 37. If that is granted, all else follows — at least in Emory University’s marketing materials.

(H/T: 5′F)

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At Mediaite, Frances Martel watches fellow liberal David Gregory on Meet the Press and reports back, “Grover Norquist: Democrats Believe ‘The Peasants Aren’t Sending Enough Cash In:’”

Gregory then turned to the more realist element of the debate: “what makes you so sure you will triumph” and a Republican president will not rebuke your pledge? “I don’t think a Republican would be likely to win a Presidential election in the general if it wasn’t clear that he wanted to go in a different direction than Obama,” Norquist replied. “If you want to raise taxes to pay for Obama’s bigger government, then you vote Democrat, for crying out loud.” He noted that all the Republican presidential candidates save Jon Huntsman had signed his pledge, and noted that an otherwise successful President like George H.W. Bush could be defeated by making a wrong move on taxes.

The problem in Washington, Norquist concluded, was misspending and not, as Democrats claimed (in his words,) that “the peasants aren’t ending enough cash in for the king to spend.”

King Barack, mentored by the man who famously said, “white folks’ greed runs a world in need,” told his fellow leftwing elitists during the 2008 coronation season that blue-collar liberals were bitter and clinging — and “something everybody knows is true.” Why would he be surprised that at his ascendance to the throne hasn’t changed that?

Speaking of which, as  Joseph Curl notes in the Washington Times, Obama’s snooty proboscis continues to remain upturned:

“Over the last decade, we became a country that relied too much on what we bought and consumed.”

- President Obama, Nov. 19, 2011

“Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.”

- President Carter, July 15, 1979

There are only two ways to look at the Obama re-election campaign right now: Either the upstart candidate who stunned the world when he defeated the Clinton machine to capture the Democratic nomination three years ago has lost every bit of that massive mojo, or the bruised and battered president, after three years in office, just doesn’t want another spin in the Oval Office.

Even before George H.W. Bush lost in November of 1992, the knock against him was that he didn’t want to repeat — despite seeming to knock off a major tyrant in the Middle East. But despite Obama’s reactionary punitive liberalism, nobody wouldn’t expect Barry to phone it in the same way the courtly Bush did 20 years ago.

Related: Daniel Pipes on “Obama’s Leftist Conundrum,”  and how it has hamstrung the SCOAMF POTUS when it comes to foreign policy.

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David Frum’s How We Got Here: The 70s The Decade That Brought You Modern Life — For Better Or Worse, published in 2000, does a thorough job of documenting the strange twists in illogic and liberal fads that dominated that rancid decade, not the least of which was Werner Erhard’s est (short for “Erhard Seminar Training”).  Erhardt was  born Jack Rosenberg, a former Philadelphia-area used car salesman who went west in the early 1960s, and created what would become one of the strangest and most ubiquitous cults of the 1970s.

The est movement became particularly fashionable amongst the Hollywood crowd, but eventually, Frum writes, “Erhard was hit by accusations of sexual molestation from one of his daughters, a colossal IRS tax lien, and a tough story by 60 Minutes. He fled the country in 1991. The tax case was eventually settled, but Erhard’s empire never recovered.” But the legacy of est lives on, particularly in its additions to the Newspeak Dictionary:

Every time someone says “I take responsibility for that,” or when we assure a friend who has got into trouble that we “support” him, or ask to be left alone by saying that we “need our space”—we are chatting away in est-speak. The essence of est-speak is its clever packaging of moral evasion as moral responsibility. What, after all, does it mean to “take responsibility”—as Attorney General Janet Reno ostensibly did after the conflagration of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, that left eighty-six people dead? She was not defending her action as right or proper under the circumstances, but neither was she apologizing or expressing remorse. Certainly she was not resigning. What she was saying, evidently, was that the action she took was taken by her. Beyond that, she had nothing to add. In a similar vein, we might wonder what it means when we tell an errant friend that we “support” him? That we condone what he has done? Probably not. That we will forgive him if he makes amends? Then we should emphasize not our support, but our expectations. That we will remain his friend no matter what he has done and whether he apologizes or not? But that’s a contemptible thing to say, isn’t it?

Not if you’re in the Obama Administration — or the MSM, judging by this headline at ABC: “Energy Secretary Chu Takes Full Responsibility for Solyndra.”

As the Professor writes, “But doesn’t resign,” the Professor adds. “He’s accepting ‘responsibility,’ but not the blame.”

The Obama’s obsession with the dated policies of corporatism and crony socialism, aging technology such as solar, and dated liberal psychobabble are yet more examples of an Administration cocooned in the past — specifically, the Carter-era seventies. They’re permanently trapped there; the rest of us can escape less than a year from now — if we want to.

Related: “Chu just said he didn’t know the Bush DoE had turned down Solyndra’s loan. Didn’t he?”

Update: Welcome Kathy Shaidle’s readers!

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Somebody on the left never got the memo of tolerance for ideological diversity — not mention having his profession’s own tactics thrown back at him:

“They think having a camera makes them a journalist. Instead, this is a cheap caricature of journalism,” writes Columbia journalism school Dean of Student Affairs Sree Sreenivasan, who recently became one of O’Keefe’s interview subjects. “He shows once again that ambush interviews and selective editing don’t make you into a citizen journalist.”

Why not? Ambush interviews and editing — and by its very nature, all editing is “selective” — have been a staple of Sixty Minutes and their legacy media knock-offs or decades. Presumably Sreenivasan has condemned this form of journalism as well, right?

As Hugh Hewitt as written, the bitter and clinging facility of the Columbia Journalism School are desperately trying to save the old order.  Or to put it another way, Investigative Journalism: It’s All Fun and Games until the MSM Gets Stung.

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Ten years ago, Michael Graham’s Redneck Nation was a humorous, P.J. O’Rourke-style look at a deadly serious problem for America: Frankfurt School-style political correctness fueling a return to the racial segregation of the pre-Civil Rights-era South, and on a national scale. (All happening “unexpectedly,” of course.) As Graham said at the time while promoting the book:

Having fled these attitudes among my rural southern neighbors, I now live in a modern, liberal America where Ivy League colleges are building segregating housing because “race matters.” I actually heard one modern defender of segregated public schools (blacks-only academies) say “black people learn differently from white people.” Gee, I haven’t heard that since I was 12 — from a Klan member!

“Black people learn differently from white people” was the very argument Rev. Wright would later make while speaking to the NAACP in 2008 (video here), about 15 minutes before he went under then-candidate Obama’s bus in 2008 and into the MSM’s memory hole. And in the years between Graham’s book and Rev. Wright’s speech, American education’s self-imposed segregation has only gotten worse, particularly on college campuses. (Anderson Cooper, always a safe barometer for center-left conventional wisdom, defended the practice last year on CNN.)

A new article at the London Telegraph spotlighted by Mark Steyn on his homepage reports on a similar racial bifurcation occurring in England:

He insisted that Britain was becoming a “silo society” as many young people never leave their own housing estate or mix with children from different racial and religious backgrounds.

The comments come amid continuing alarm over segregation in inner-city communities.

Entrenched segregation in the education system was seen as one of the fundamental causes of the race riots that rocked parts of northern England a decade ago.

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Past performance is no guarantee of future results:

It seems almost in bad taste to talk about dollars and cents after an act of mass murder. Nonetheless, we must ask about the economic aftershocks from Tuesday’s horror. These aftershocks need not be major. Ghastly as it may seem to say this, the terror attack — like the original day of infamy, which brought an end to the Great Depression — could even do some economic good.

– Paul Krugman of the New York Times, September 14th, 2001.

Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times, steps into the WABAC machine and guides us through some truly improbable history:

Here’s the situation: The U.S. economy has been crippled by a financial crisis. The president’s policies have limited the damage, but they were too cautious, and unemployment remains disastrously high. More action is clearly needed. Yet the public has soured on government activism, and seems poised to deal Democrats a severe defeat in the midterm elections.

The president in question is Franklin Delano Roosevelt; the year is 1938. Within a few years, of course, the Great Depression was over. But it’s both instructive and discouraging to look at the state of America circa 1938–instructive because the nature of the recovery that followed refutes the arguments dominating today’s public debate, discouraging because it’s hard to see anything like the miracle of the 1940s happening again.

What Krugman calls “the miracle of the 1940s” is more commonly known as World War II, a ruinous conflict that cost some 60 million lives, including more than 400,000 American ones, and that entailed the near-extermination of Europe’s Jewish population.

World War II is sometimes called a “good war,” meaning that few dispute American intervention was necessary or that we fought on the right side. But this easy moral clarity is possible only because the Axis actions that started the war were unambiguously evil.

In April 2009 we noted that David Leonhardt, a Krugman colleague at the Times, had praised the economic policies of Germany’s National Socialist Party. Now Krugman calls World War II itself a “miracle.” The Old Gray Lady is in the grips of utter madness.

– James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal, September 8th, 2010.

Krugman: Paul Ryan’s budget ‘would kill people’

There he goes again.

Bombastic New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has launched another overblown attack on House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget.

“To be a little melodramatic, the budget would kill people,” Krugman told CNN as part of a profile of Ryan. “No question.”

– Philip Klein of the Washington Examiner, today.

(“Kill people?” That sounds remarkably like the eliminationist rhetoric that I recall one New York Times economic writer hectoring us all to avoid back in January. Say, what was that guy’s name, anyhow?)

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“Assume you are a senior political aide in the Obama White House,” Peter Wehner writes at Commentary, wishing a truly ignominious fate upon his readers. Fortunately, such a horrible career choice will only last as long as his blog post:

This morning, while eating a bowl of Cheerios, you read the front page of the Washington Post, where you found an above-the-fold story by Joel Achenbach. The story, titled “Is debt downgrade an alarm bell for a great nation in decline?” quotes Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served Jimmy Carter, who was jettisoned from office after his first term in large part because of the sense his policies were ushering in a period of American decline.

According to Brzezinski, “We have been for decades now the number one global economic power. But an increasing question mark is whether we are going to remain one.”

As Wehner adds, “when journalists take to the front page of the Washington Post to analyze whether or not we are seeing ‘the American empire in twilight,’ you can bet things are–politically speaking–very bad and about to get even worse.”

But hey, is that really such a bad thing to imagine if you’re a senior political aide to President Obama? Because if you put down the Washington Post (in the sense of putting the paper back onto your desk, as opposed to the way the Blogosphere puts down the Washington Post), you can then pick up a copy of Foreign Policy which is busy singing the praises of American decline.  Heck, Charles Kenny shouts “Three Cheers for Decline,” complete with a photo of the American flag in twilight, asking us to “Look on the bright side, America: Downgrading your global ambitions could make you a healthier and happier nation:”

Defense cuts would allow the United States to tend to a few other priorities, which just might take Americans’ minds off the fact that their country is no longer No. 1. Perhaps the United States could focus on constructing a high-speed rail line or two, or maybe even finish the job on extending health care. After all, of the large economies that enjoyed a AAA rating from Standard & Poor’s last week, the United States ranked at the bottom of the list in terms of life expectancy, and it was the only country without universal health care. Perhaps America could also spend a little more on basic education; the United States was at the tail end of the AAA club when it came to believing basic scientific truths like evolution, and it scored lowest out of all those countries on international tests of students’ math skills.

The end of Britain’s imperial ambitions allowed the country to abandon national service and just relax a little. Similarly, with less need to flag the martial spirit through adrenaline-pumping threat alerts and wars on terror, the United States could find a moment to reform its criminal justice system; another international indicator where the United States remains in the lead, after all, is in percentage of its population behind bars. And once America accepts it doesn’t need to work every waking hour to keep up with the Soviets, Japanese, or Chinese, perhaps it could take time for a vacation. At the moment, there is no statutory minimum for paid leave in the United States. Even Singapore provides seven days, and the rest of the AAA club gives employees minimums ranging from 18 to 30 days.

As to foreign relations, the United States couldn’t — and wouldn’t — follow Britain’s example and join the European Union, but here too, there could be scope for baby steps. What about signing up for the International Criminal Court or taking a less obstructive line during climate negotiations? In fact, a decline from hyperpower status will doubtless help prolong the upward trend in international opinion of the United States. It’s even possible that the U.S. government could get more done in the world by playing nice than barging around on its own.

Whatever happens to the United States in the global economic rankings, it will remain a great country. Accepting — even embracing — decline will serve as a reminder that American exceptionalism is built on a set of values, not stock indices. If the S&P downgrade helps the United States foster a shift toward prioritizing the good life over great-power status, perhaps it will be seen as a blessing in disguise. What’s more, the United States starts out its decline with many advantages over 1950s Britain. Not least, in large parts of the country, it is already possible to find a good restaurant — something that took the Brits 30-plus years of not-so-bad power status to achieve.

Yes, including Pho restaurants owned by former South Vietnamese boat people who fled when a Democratic Congress pulled the rug out from under our defense of South Vietnam, Afghani restaurants owned by people who fled because we’ve failed to pacify the Taliban, Chinese restaurants owned by people who would rather live here than in Thomas Friedman’s Beijing Jetsons wonderland for some strange reason, etc.

But I digress.

How is President Obama coping with this sort of cognitive dissonance? As we’ve seen, not very well, which is why the third year in Obama’s first term feels like the exhausted last year of a two term-president, where everybody, from the staff to the voters to likely the president himself can’t wait to go home and bring in the new guy.

Which is why, Mickey Kaus writes, “We’ve reached the stage in Obama’s presidency when he can’t seem to do anything right:”

 Even his summer house is on fire.  At a similar point in Jimmy Carter’s presidency Carter collapsed in a road race.  (I urge Obama to refrain from strenuous athletics until his approval rating gets back above 44%.) Everyone’s piling on–from the left as well as the right and the center. It’s almost enough to make my inner contrarian demand that I defend the guy. Almost, but not quite.

Here’s the thing: When other presidents have reached this point–at least other Democratic presidents, Carter and  Bill Clinton–they have recognized the problem and tried to get fresh advice. Carter had a series of excessively well-publicized meetings with critics. Clinton met secretly and more effectively with non-liberal strategist Dick Morris. And Obama?

The president is in a situation in which virtually none of his considered beliefs–in Keynesian economics, in the power of redistributive populism, in coalition politics, in  his own oratorical skill–is being affirmed by the real world. It’s like the period Thomas Kuhn talks about in his famous Structure of Scientific Revolutions, when scientists are working along within the old “paradigm” but the data start coming back funny. Most scientists just ignore the discordant data and keep plodding along. A few start to question the “paradigm.” You’d want a President in tough times to be one of the latter, no? You’d expect someone like Obama to undertake some reevaluation.  As Bret Stephens noted recently, genuinely smart people know what they don’t know–or in this case they know what they used to know but now aren’t so sure about anymore.

Barack Obama was quoted on the campaign stump by one of his biographers as saying, “You know, I actually believe my own bulls***.” The problem is that there’s so much bulls*** for Obama the Fightin’ Progressive to believe, and it’s mutually contradictory.

Construction unions exist to build things, but environmentalists exist to stop them, in addition to calling for the destruction of previously built projects such as hydroelectric dams. Obama calls for lower energy prices, but as a candidate promised a major US newspaper that he’d bankrupt the coal industry, and a major TV network that he was perfectly cool about higher gas prices, as long as their adjustment is “gradual” enough. He tells Americans not to drive SUVs as a candidate, but as president requires American taxpayers to absorb the bottomless debt of two of the America’s three purveyors of SUVs. Politicians on both sides of the aisle love to funnel defense department projects to companies like Boeing, but Obama was beholden to his largely anti-war base, which he doesn’t mind flipping the bird to, because hey, where are they going to go? Obama promises over and over again to focus like a laser on jobs, but businesses are terrified to hire and expand because of the regulatory uncertainty that defines his administration.

Note this passage in the Washington Post article that Peter Wehner linked to at Commentary:

The downgrading of U.S. debt may be more symbolic than empirically significant, but it gives one small data point to those who argue that America isn’t what it used to be, that it is an empire in twilight.

It was 70 years ago that Time magazine founder Henry Luce introduced the concept of “The American Century.” The term was ideologically loaded and did not wear well with those who feared, rather than celebrated, American hegemony. The naming rights to the new century seem to be up for grabs. Today, there are a slew of books that ponder a “post-American” epoch.

And Obama’s been photographed carrying one, written by a journalist and CNN talking head who eagerly puffs himself out and calls himself an advisor to the president (speaking of doublethink).

And speaking of twilight, perhaps this passage from the postwar left’s user’s manual sums up the complexities and contradictions of doublethink:

‘What are the stars?’ said O’Brien indifferently. ‘They are bits of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the centre of the universe. The sun and the stars go round it.’

Winston made another convulsive movement. This time he did not say anything. O’Brien continued as though answering a spoken objection:

‘For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When we navigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometres away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?’

Juggling all of that cognitive dissonance inside your cranium can really wear a man out — no wonder Obama needs to hit the links and Martha’s Vineyard so frequently.

Of course, if you consider your own rhetoric to be “bull***,” don’t be surprised if the rest of us think of it that way, too:

Related: Victor Davis Hanson at the Hoover Institute on Obama vs. Obama. “Barack Obama is now at war with Barack Obama. It is not just that the public has fathomed that what Obama says one day will change the next. It is more troublesome than that: Americans are catching on that what Obama now insists is true usually proves at odds with what Obama once asserted. So the nation is insidiously tuning him out—a novel and annoying experience for the president, who heretofore had received little criticism over his habitual inconsistencies and had assumed his formidable powers of rhetoric and his own landmark heritage would trump any scrutiny from nit-picky critics.”

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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.”

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“National Journal’s Hirsh: Time for a moral sanction against gun metaphors similar to the ‘N’ word,” Jeff Poor wrote at the Daily Caller on January 21st:

National Journal’s Michael Hirsh wants to raise the bar on decorum to an entirely new level. On Thursday’s MSNBC airing of “Hardball,” Hirsh told host Chris Matthews certain “gun” terms should be stricken from political discourse and referred to instances where Minnesota Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann and former Republican Nevada senatorial candidate Sharon Angle used such off-limits language.

“Well we don’t want any more duels and thankfully that was the last one,” Hirsh said. “[B]ut the point I was trying to make is you can draw a line particularly in the use of certain kinds of metaphors. The use of gun metaphors – killing, murdering, taking out, which was another metaphor for a – Michele Bachmann used in one of her statements, Sharon Angle – the Nevada Senate candidate’s now infamous comment about quote, unquote, ‘second amendment remedies’ to deal with the problem Harry Reid, her opponent.”

His proposal? Make such language inappropriate in the same racial slurs are inappropriate.

That’s the kind of language I think we got to have a hard think about now,” Hirsh said. “Do we really want to continue to use that kind of language at these levels? Or, should there be kind of a social sanction, not a legal one, but a moral sanction in the way that we’ve stopped using certain epithets like the ‘n’-word public forums. Stop using that kind of language, those kinds of metaphors.”

The BlogProf today: “NYT’s Frank Rich: ‘If You Put A Reloaded Gun’ Up To Palin Would She Know About Bill Ayers?‘”

Of course she would — to borrow from another famous Stalinist, her source was the New York Times.

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That was then…

Stephen Jukes, global news editor for Reuters, the British wire service, has ordered his scribes not to use the word terror to refer to the Sept. 11 atrocity, the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz reports (second item). “We all know that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter and that Reuters upholds the principle that we do not use the word terrorist,” Jukes writes in an internal memo. “To be frank, it adds little to call the attack on the World Trade Center a terrorist attack.”

This is now: “Reuters Labels Norway Terror Suspect as ‘Right-Wing’ 25 Times.”

More from Glenn Reynolds and Ben Shapiro, guest-blogging at Ricochet, who explores “The Oslo Monster and the Rules of Violent Ideology.”

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Mark Steyn on how political correctness run amok leads to criminalizing comedy:

I read The Joke, Milan Kundera’s first novel, when I was a schoolboy. Bit above my level, but, even as a teenager, I liked the premise. Ludvik is a young man in post-war, newly Communist Czechoslovakia. He’s a smart, witty guy, a loyal Party member with a great future ahead of him. His girlfriend, though, is a bit serious. So when she writes to him from her two-week Party training course enthusing about the early-morning calisthenics and the “healthy atmosphere,” he scribbles off a droll postcard:

Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky! Ludvik.

A few weeks later, he’s called before a committee of the District Party Secretariat. He tries to explain he was making a joke. Immediately they remove him from his position at the Students Union; then they expel him from the Party, and the university; and shortly thereafter he’s sent to work in the mines. As a waggish adolescent, I liked the absurdity of the situation in which Ludvik finds himself. Later, I came to appreciate that Kundera had skewered the touchiness of totalitarianism, and the consequential loss of any sense of proportion. It was the book I read on the flight to Vancouver, when Maclean’s magazine and I were hauled before the British Columbia “Human Rights” Tribunal for the crime of “flagrant Islamophobia.” In the course of a week-long trial, the best part of a day was devoted to examining, with the aid of “expert witnesses,” the “tone” of my jokes.

* * *

Who would have thought all the old absurdist gags of Eastern Europe circa 1948 would transplant themselves to the heart of the West so effortlessly? Indeed, a latter-day Kundera would surely reject as far too obvious a scenario in which lesbians and feminists lean on eunuch males to destroy a man for disrespecting the vascularized vagina by suggesting that semen might have restorative properties. “Give it to me straight, doc. I can take it”? Not anymore. Kundera’s Joke is now on us.

George Orwell certainly had no problem transposing the digits of the year 1948 to see how the socialism of the then-current Soviet Union and its incumbent show trials could eventually spread westward in about half a century. I never thought of Orwell as going in much for gut-busting humor, but I doubt he’d be surprised by the current state of comedy as thoughtcrime.

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“Metaphor Abuse” is one of those things that make blogger Dr. Weevil go “hmmm:”

Prof. Pecinovsky of the University of Missouri thinks (perhaps not quite the right verb) that the United States is “the belly of the beast” (þ InstaPundit), yet he continues to live here, when there are undoubtedly other countries to which he could emigrate. If he chooses to live in the belly of a beast, and to accept sustenance from it (a salary paid for by the taxpayers of Missouri), doesn’t that make him a metaphorical tapeworm?

Not to mention not-so-boldly going where Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn have metaphorically gone before, including this quote from Dohrn in 2007:

It was an incredible thing for him to say [Martin Luther King's assertion that the US was "the greatest purveyor of violence" in the world], the greatest purveyor of violence on this earth is my own country. There were certainly other purveyors of violence. I think that’s still true today. If we think it’s true today, that has incredible implications for all of us right now. We who are, as we used to say, in the belly of the beast … It again means not that we are the only purveyor of violence in the world, but that we have an extraordinary, special responsibility, not necessarily the most enviable one, of how to act here, inside the heart of the monster.

Video of Dohrn’s remarks here; the above passage comes about the five minute mark:

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With the world scheduled to come to end sometime tomorrow, I thought I’d be clear out the Firefox tabs I’ve had open for a while now and end on a clean slate. So, in somewhat random order (think of it as the William Boroughs Cut-Up Method of cut and pasting!), here goes:

• At the Anchoress’s blog, is revisionist punctuation “A Menace to Our Way of Life?” If so, I’d say it’s time to Eat, Shoot & Leave the offending periods and semicolons.

• DaTechGuy spots the left blowing a gasket that Texas conservatives are rewriting the leftwing revisionist textbooks of the past forty years or so. How dare you revise our revisionism — only we’re allowed to control history here in Oceania!

• Speaking of those who view 1984 as a user’s guide to power, Steve Hayward explores the Left’s omnipresent Totalitarian Temptation. Why is it so easy for them to fall in love with Big Brother?

• OK, one more riff on Orwell’s 1984. City Journal breaks down “The Washington Diet,” which for schoolkids will be enforced via two-way telescreens, with automated morning wake-up calls for the more tardy of the Airstrip One Youth League, if need be.

• The Politico on “Obama the Desperate.” Let’s hope we see a lot of these headlines between now and November of 2012.

• David Boaz of the Cato Institute quotes George Will on the self-described anarchists of Europe, “Anti-government mobs composed almost entirely of government employees going berserk about threats to their entitlements!” But other than being officially on the government payroll, anarchy and Big Government has always historically gone together like fist and glove.

• “Governor Cuomo says gay marriage is one of his top three priorities. Mayor Bloomberg says it is his number one priority.” Wow, who knew that building more bike lanes wasn’t Mayor Mike’s number one priority when it comes to the social re-engineering of Manhattan?

• “Prince Charles says Americans eat too much steak.” And they often live in unsightly giant McMansions, too. Though rarely as large as this one, with its enormous carbon footprint. For shame!

• “Same Roger Ebert Who Sees Coded Racism in ‘Food Stamps’ Publishes Excuse for Director’s Pro-Nazi Rant On His Journal.” For once though, Cannes had more sense.

• “In China, some new cities are ghost towns.” Thomas Friedman could not be reached for comment. But ahh, the remarkable efficiency of central planning.

• Investor’s Business Daily asks, “Has anyone stopped to think of what the world would be like if the environmentalists were in charge?” Wait, they’re not?

• “Believing in BBC’s ethos is equivalent to a faith, job tribunal rules.” Well, much of the left is the equivalent of an alternative religion, so that’s not too surprising.

Finally, “TV Ownership Down in America, Nielsen Says.” But James Lileks looks back fondly to when it was a way of life, complete with its own bible. But check out the letters from readers that were printed in the TV Guide from 1968 that Lileks is digitizing. As Lileks notes, “Compare to modern YouTube pages. Of course they got ranting stuff written in crayon on butcher paper, but in those days there were mechanisms in place to suppress those things, not give them a platform to be viewed by millions.”

This one is fun:

My compliments to ABC News. They needed only an hour and a half to tell us what happened at the Republican convention; it took CBS and NBC all evening long. Also, Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley added a great deal of interest and, in most cases, understanding.

Mrs. Cal Heathman, Champaign, Ill.

Gore’s red-lining the Godwin meter and presumably declaring this week’s coming fascist state to America along the way certainly added a great deal of interest as well.

See you later today, tomorrow, and — with a little luck, possibly Sunday as well. But I’m definitely taking my Popeil Pocket Mezuzah everywhere I go on Saturday to avoid being smited, just to be on the safe side.

(Concept via Jimmie Bise.)

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In olden days, higher education used to be a way to learn more about God. Then it became a way to learn more about life, and how to function on a high level in the real world.

Beginning in the 1960s, academia slowly morphed into a method of forcing a particular worldview upon students, a trend that’s only accelerating, as several recent articles highlight.

First up, a look at Kate Swift, “The Scourge of the Feminist Word Police,” who decided to create her own Newspeak Dictionary:

If you’ve ever felt a twinge of anxiety at hearing someone use “humankind” as a substitute for mankind, or if you’ve winced at the proliferation of the politically correct suffix “person” — as in “chairperson,” or “policeperson” — when the more traditional “man” would be perfectly suitable, chances are you’ve suffered from the corrupting linguistic legacy of feminist writer Kate Swift. Swift, who died last week at 87, was one of a squadron of feminist language police whose crusade to remake language to suit their political agendas has wreaked havoc on everyday English.

Feminists had tried to reform language long before Swift and her fellow word scolds arrived on the scene. In 1949, feminist icon Simone de Beauvoir charged that language was “inherited from a masculine society and contains many male prejudices.” She advised that “women have to steal the instrument” and “use it for their own good.”

Swift and her co-author, Casey Miller, attempted precisely such a heist in their influential 1981 book, The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing. The book had two main premises, both of them dubious. The first was that sexism and sexual discrimination were embedded in the English language. The second was that the language needed to be radically revised in order to change society’s attitudes and make it more inclusive.

Informed more by feminist ideology than linguistic scholarship, the book’s suggested recommendations ranged from the awkward to the downright absurd. For instance, judging the word “mankind” sexist, the authors recommended that it be replaced with “genkind.” Not content simply to ruin existing language, the authors also proposed feminist-friendly neologisms. Thus, “tey,” “ter” and “tem” were to become the sex-neutral surrogates for “he/she,” “his/her” and “him/her.”

Swift and Casey’s more eccentric suggestions failed to catch on, but their book proved a giant leap for genkind, unleashing a wave of feminist assaults on the English language. Picking up where The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing left off, a “feminist dictionary” soon announced in all seriousness that the word “brotherhood” could no longer be used to describe non-fraternal kinship because “it ignores generations of sisters.” Emboldened, feminists insisted that women must now be referred to as “wimmin,” and that history had to become “herstory.”

Had such linguistic absurdities remained confined to the pages of obscure feminist tracts, they would have been a merely an illiterate footnote to the history of modern English. But they became part of the cultural mainstream when the professional arbiters of language embraced the feminist reformation. And so the American Library Association adopted a resolution pledging to avoid supposedly sexist terminology, while the Linguistic Society of America established a Committee on the Status of Women in Linguistics for the same purpose. Universities turned feminist recommendations into campus policies, and the worlds of publishing and journalism followed suit, ruining language use for new generations of speakers and writers.

And introspect, in light of some of the more recent obsessions on campus, the Past really was Pronoun.

Henry Kissinger once said, “I formulated the rule that the intensity of academic politics and the bitterness of it is in inverse proportion to the importance of the subject their [sic] discussing. And I promise you at Harvard, they are passionately intense and the subjects are extremely unimportant.”

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I’m pretty sure the left (and Lindsey Graham) has step #1 down absolutely stone cold:

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Related: “Dog Bites Man, Plane Lands Safely,” and . . .

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“Anarchy: Would someone please get the media a dictionary:”

You may have noticed over the weekend that most newspaper and TV reports blamed the violent London riots on anarchists. A new kind of anarchists, apparently, who believe in big government.

Just to make sure we correctly understood anarchy, we went to the dictionary to double check our understanding of the word:

Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, and instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchy.
Source: Wikipedia.org

Look how easy that was. It took us about two seconds to do what the media couldn’t bother doing.

Obviously, members of the left wing media would rather choke on their own vomit than admit the riots were caused by socialists and communists and union thugs and other assorted left wing lunatics demanding not just a continuation of the government gravy train, but more government, bigger government, all-encompassing government.

So they were magically transformed into anarchists who rioted in order to bring about a system that’s in direct contradiction of their own philosophy.

Not necessarily — ever since Stalin started labeling leftwing heretics as fascists in the 1920s, we spent nearly a century looking for fascism in all the wrong places. We shouldn’t be surprised that the common definition of anarchy suffered a similar fate.

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