In a conversation with Mr. Young, Kennedy waxed sentimental about Washington in the early 1960s: “It used to be civilized. The media was on our side. We’d get our work done by one o’clock and by two we were at the White House chasing women. We got the job done, and the reporters focused on the issues. . . . It was civilized.” We now know that Mr. Edwards’s idea of civilization was much the same as Kennedy’s.
(And Mad Men would have you believe that everyone who engaged in these types of extracurricular activities in the early 1960s was a Republican businessman.)
Flash-forward nearly half a century, and it’s obvious that “civilization,” Ted Kennedy-style, rolls on:
A spokesman says Democratic Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, a retired Marine Corps officer who became an outspoken critic of the Iraq war, has died. He was 77.
The London Times reports that “the scientist at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ email scandal has revealed that he was so traumatised by the global backlash against him that he contemplated suicide:”
Professor Phil Jones said in an exclusive interview with The Sunday Times that he had thought about killing himself “several times”. He acknowledged similarities to Dr David Kelly, the scientist who committed suicide after being exposed as the source for a BBC report that alleged the government had “sexed up” evidence to justify the invasion of Iraq.
In emails that were hacked into and seized upon by global-warming sceptics before the Copenhagen climate summit in December, Jones appeared to call upon his colleagues to destroy scientific data rather than release it to people intent on discrediting their work monitoring climate change.
Jones, 57, said he was unprepared for the scandal: “I am just a scientist. I have no training in PR or dealing with crises.”
But he and the gang behind Climategate had few qualms about causing them. As Mark Steyn wrote back in late 2009:
Yet perhaps the most important revelation is not the collusion, the bullying, the politicization and the evidence-planting, but the fact that, even if you wanted to do honest “climate research” at the Climatic Research Unit, the data and the models are now so diseased by the above that they’re all but useless. Let Ian “Harry” Harris, who works in “climate scenario development and data manipulation” at the CRU, sum it up. Mr. Harris was attempting to duplicate previous results—i.e., to duplicate all that science that’s supposedly settled, and the questioning of which consigns you to the Climate Branch of the Flat Earth Society. How hard should it be to confirm settled science? After much cyber-gnashing of teeth, Harry throws in the towel:
“ARGH. Just went back to check on synthetic production. Apparently—I have no memory of this at all—we’re not doing observed rain days! It’s all synthetic from 1990 onwards. So I’m going to need conditionals in the update program to handle that. And separate gridding before 1989. And what TF happens to station counts?
“OH F–K THIS. It’s Sunday evening, I’ve worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I’m hitting yet another problem that’s based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity, it’s just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they’re found.”
Thus spake the Settled Scientist: “OH F–K THIS.” And on the basis of “OH F–K THIS” the world’s enlightened progressives will assemble at Copenhagen for the single greatest advance in punitive liberalism ever perpetrated on the developed world.
And it also seems more than a little disingenuous for Jones to say he has no training in PR, given that the folks at the core of the Climategate scandal have been basically using the legacy media as a de factopress release distribution mechanism.
Though he’s been caught manipulating the truth, I’m glad that Jones didn’t commit an inconvenient felo-de-se. Of course, there are environmentalists even more radical than Jones who wish the rest of us would touch the face of Gaia — sooner, rather than later.
Great moments in newspaper corrections, courtesy of New Hampshire’sNashua Telegraph:
A story on Page 1 of Tuesday’s Telegraph quoted a White House official explaining that a Q-and-A session with dozens of teenagers in Nashua High School North on Monday was “off the record.” However, the explanation about the talk being “off the record” was, it turns out, also “off the record” and should not have been quoted.
Found via Diana Hsieh, who dubs it “Best newspaper correction ever, and adds, “Sometimes I feel like we’re living in a Kafka novel.”
Tim Graham of Newsbusters is giving McNamara plenty of grief, but she may be onto something about the two media figures:
One’s an extremely talented, photogenic, if slightly distant and haughty actress expert at reading whatever dialogue her producers put in front of her.
The other starred in some wonderful movies with Spencer Tracy.
(And of course, McNamara is far from the first journalist to stumble onto the truth about television newsreaders.)
That’s Ann Althouse’s take on how the legacy media covers the former governor and GOP vice presidential nominee. Of course, the same model was applied to President Bush: blithering idiot that up to a third of the Reality-Based Community believe destroyed the World Trade Center on 9/11.
The model of Republican=idiot dates back at least to the 1950s, when President Eisenhower — the man who helped win World War II — was considered an intellectual lightweight by much of the media. Reagan was thought of in much the same way. We’ve just witnessed eight years of similar coverage of President Bush.
On the other hand, in the Obama era, it’s gotten worse. Or as the Christian Science Monitor quotes Andrew Breitbart’s speech yesterday at the Tea Party convention, “Breitbart said reporters put all news involving conservatives into two basic buckets: ‘racism and Watergate.’”
Just ask General Electric employee Rachel Maddow, who reported on the convention as, literally, racists in “white hoods.”
100 people were working at the time and reports indicate that many were hurt and that fatalities are likely.
Ambulances and fire trucks were rushing to the scene, but no other details are available.
Update:
A CNN report indicates that two people have died and dozens more were injured in a gas explosion that was felt around the state. A later report has pushed the potential death toll to 50.
Two prominent journalists appeared on Friday’s Good Morning America and casually admitted that Barack Obama has received glowing coverage from the press. Former Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor Tina Brown announced, “No, [Obama] got the best press known to man. Let’s face it.”
Howard Kurtz, host of Reliable Sources on CNN and a Washington Post columnist, corrected, “In the history of civilization.” The liberal Brown quickly agreed, “In the history of civilization, incredible.”
No it isn’t — he’ll get close to the same sort of fawning coverage in 2012 as well. This is what the media does — remember Evan Thomas saying in the fall of 2004 that media bias was worth 15 points to John Kerry and John Edwards? And dubbed the Winter Soldier and his philandering veep nominee “The Sunshine Boys?” They’ll then, immediately after the election, issue mock-apologies, phony mea culpas and worthless hand-wringing, and then go back and act the same way four years later.
At the National Prayer Breakfast, Barack Obama singled out for praise Navy Corpsman Christian Bouchard. Or, as the president called him, “Corpseman Bouchard.” Twice.
Hey, not a big deal. Throughout his life, the commander in chief has had little contact with the military, and less interest. And, when you give as many speeches as this guy does, there’s no time to rehearse or read through: You just gotta fire up the prompter and wing it. But it’s revealing that nobody around him in the so-called smartest administration of all time thought to spell it out phonetically for him when the speech got typed up and loaded into the machine. Which suggests that either his minders don’t know that he doesn’t know that kinda stuff, or they don’t know it, either. To put it in Rumsfeldian terms, they don’t know what they don’t know.
Which is embarrassingly true. Hence, the awful flop speeches, from the Copenhagen Olympics to the Berlin Wall anniversary video to the Martha Coakley rally. The palpable whiff given off by the White House inner circle is that they’re the last people on the planet still besotted by Barack Obama, and that they’re having such a cool time starring in their own reality-show remake of “The West Wing” they can only conceive of the public – and, indeed, the world – as crowd-scene extras in “The Barack Obama Show.” They expect you to cheer and wave flags when the floor manager tells you to, but the notion that, in return, he should be able to persuade you of the merits of his policies seems entirely to have eluded them.
Today, we’re honoring what would have been the birthday of an actor and broadcaster who spent many years preparing himself to be president, but as Steyn writes above, we’re stuck in 2010 with a president who’s served briefly in the Senate, only to wind up trapped in his own reality show. Obama isn’t the second coming of Harry Truman — he’s the reincarnation of Truman Burbank. To build on what Steyn writes above, Obama and his staff are living out the trapped, fishbowl existence of Carrey’s titular character in The Truman Show.
And of course, it’s the audience that pays its salary, as Jonah Goldberg writes:
Early Cold War movies from the 1950s rank pretty high as targets for film-school vivisection. For decades, film historians have insisted that Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is a thinly veiled (and paranoid) allegory about Communist infiltration. The movie ends with the protagonist screaming directly into the camera: “They’re here already! You’re next! You’re next!”
The funny thing is that the filmmakers never saw it as an allegory about anything.
That doesn’t mean Body Snatchers didn’t reflect Cold War anxieties. But it’s a good reminder that filmmakers aren’t always aware of their inspirations and that sometimes the best way to articulate a larger message is to not try to.
Indeed, when Hollywood tries too hard, it usually comes out lame. The original Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) was driven by a fear that the Cold War would turn hot and mankind’s propensity for violence would destroy the world. The 2008 remake with Keanu Reeves — playing yet another emotionally impaired, semi-stupid, quasi-robotic savior figure — was a predictably lame lecture about how humans (i.e., Americans) are bad stewards of the environment. It wouldn’t have been so annoying if it weren’t for the fact that the same movie is made nearly every year.
Since the end of the Cold War, Hollywood has been in desperate pursuit of enemies. You’d have thought that 9/11 would have provided a great opportunity for Hollywood to find a worthy enemy. But it turned out that moviemakers were more comfortable depicting jihadi terrorists before 9/11 than after (rent The Siege and Executive Decision if you don’t believe me). They’ve tried (and retried) aliens, drug kingpins, bad weather, and the always-enjoyable zombies. But, with a few exceptions, Hollywood is still most comfortable with the idea that the enemy is really us.
When he was 17, Ike’sscreenwriter and co-executive producer Lionel Chetwynd joined the 3rd Battalion Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment), spending two years in the Canadian peacetime military. During that time he met some veterans of Dieppe, a bloody but necessary dress rehearsal to D-Day that established the futility of invading a fortified European port.Now in his early 60s, Chetwynd is a longtime naturalized American citizen who was born in England and raised in Montreal. He’d remembered from Canadian regimental history that of the 4,400-odd Canadians sent to Dieppe, about 3,600 were killed. Although they knew it was basically a suicide mission, not one man failed to report for duty. Chetwynd asked one of the old soldiers in his regiment, Sgt. Gordon Betts, why.
“My generation had to figure out what we were ready to die for,” Chetwynd recalled Betts telling him. “You kids don’t even know what to live for.”
Many years later, when Chetwynd was a successful Hollywood writer specializing in historical dramas, he told the Dieppe story during a Malibu dinner party — as a sort of tribute to the men who died there so people could sit around debating politics at Malibu dinner parties. One of the guests was a network head who asked Chetwynd to come in and pitch the story.
“So I went in,” Chetwynd told me, “and someone there said, ‘So these bloodthirsty generals sent these men to a certain death?’
“And I said, ‘Well, they weren’t bloodthirsty; they wept. But how else were we to know how Hitler could be toppled from Europe?’ And she said, ‘Well, who’s the enemy?’ I said, ‘Hitler. The Nazis.’ And she said, ‘Oh, no, no, no. I mean, who’s the real enemy?’”
“It was the first time I realized,” Chetwynd continued, “that for many people evil such as Nazism can only be understood as a cipher for evil within ourselves. They’ve become so persuaded of the essential ugliness of our society and its military, that to tell a war story is to tell the story of evil people.”
As long as they’re complacent middle class Americans — Hollywood obviously isn’t going to risk calling anyone who can shoot back evil.
In 2003, Helen Thomas wrote, “No wonder Bush doesn’t connect with the rest of the country:”
President Bush recently gave an hour-long exclusive interview to Fox TV anchor Brit Hume, who tossed him a series of softball questions.Among them, Bush was asked how he gets his news. Answer: He relies on briefings by chief of staff Andrew Card and national security affairs adviser Condoleezza Rice.
He walks into the Oval Office in the morning, Bush said, and asks Card: “What’s in the newspapers worth worrying about? I glance at the headlines just to kind of (get) a flavor of what’s moving,” Bush said. “I rarely read the stories,” he said.
Instead, the president continued, he gets “briefed by people who have probably read the news themselves.” Rice, on the other hand, is getting the news “directly from the participants on the world stage.”
Bush said this had long been his practice.
“I have great respect for the media,” he said. “I mean, our society is a good, solid democracy because of a good, solid media. But I also understand that a lot of times there’s opinions mixed in with news.”
To which Hume told Bush: “I won’t disagree with that, sir.”
Bush continued: “I appreciate people’s opinions, but I’m more interested in news. And the best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what’s happening in the world.”
What struck me and a lot of other folks about the interview was Bush’s revelation that he does not read newspapers.
Anyone who wants to stay in touch with national, international and local events looks forward to reading the newspaper every day. The variety and breadth of newspaper stories make Americans the best-informed people in the world.
At today’s question and answer session between President Obama and his former Democratic colleagues in the Senate, members got a bit of unexpected TV-viewing advice from the Commander in Chief: stop watching politics on TV.
Perhaps he’d prefer they tune into WhiteHouse.gov?
The president’s advice came in answer to a question from Sen. Mike Bennet, D-CO, who is facing a difficult re-election fight back home and wanted to know what Democrats and Republicans can do “to fix this institution so that our democracy can actually withstand the test that we’re facing right now.”
“You know what I think would actually make a difference, Michael? I think if everybody here — excuse all the members of the press who are here — if everybody here turned off your CNN, your Fox, your blogs,” Obama said, before being interrupted by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-CA, who piped up, “And MSNBC!”
Ronald Reagan would have been 99 today; found via Power Line, Paul Kengor (whom I interviewed a few years ago about his 2006 book on Reagan, The Crusader) tells a story that certainly helps to put the Gipper into context:
Central to that likability was Reagan’s humility. The word “I” didn’t dominate his conversation, unless he was poking fun at himself. He was no narcissist. Ronald Reagan was not full of pride; he was thoroughly unpossessed of self-love.
And so, with that background, I’d like to take the opportunity presented by Reagan’s time of year — not to mention the month of Presidents’ Day — to share an anecdote that was told to me by Bill Clark, Reagan’s close friend and most significant adviser.
At the time this happened, Clark was serving as Reagan’s national-security adviser. He had previously been deputy secretary of state, and would later be appointed secretary of the interior. His driver all this time was a man named Joe Bullock, a Georgia native who had moved to Washington during the Great Depression. Joe was a victim of the cruel Jim Crow laws that afflicted the South. He went to Washington for a better life.
Joe first found employment as a mule driver. He eventually began chauffeuring various senior people in the federal government, some of whom, including a high-level figure in the Carter administration, didn’t treat him well; in fact, that previous cabinet secretary didn’t speak a word to Joe in three years.
Thus, Joe was taken aback when Bill Clark not only talked to him, asking questions about his life and family, but also asked whether he could sit up front. Clark rode shotgun with Joe, drawing more than a few stares and safety concerns as well, since Clark, given his influence in national security, was a target of America’s enemies.
One morning, Clark’s father visited Washington. He hit it off with Joe. Clark’s father was a rancher, a man of the West. He gave Joe a gift: a Western-style belt, with a kind of “John Wayne belt buckle,” as Clark described it. Joe loved it, proudly displaying it by always leaving his blue suit-jacket unbuttoned.
That belt soon assumed a life of its own. A state visit by England’s Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip was upcoming, and protocol demanded that the White House provide gifts. Clark, Reagan, and a few others brainstormed following a morning briefing. For Philip, Clark suggested a “Western belt.” He had one in mind, made by Si Jenkins, a Santa Barbara friend of both Clark and the president. (Reagan, too, was a California rancher.)
“Well, what does it look like?” asked Reagan. Clark noted he had a model in the car: Joe, who was wearing the belt. “Send him up,” ordered the president. They called for Joe, who entered via the door of Reagan’s secretary.
Joe had worked for the federal government for half a century, but had never been within 50 yards of the Oval Office. He walked in. He saw Clark, Vice President Bush, the senior aides, and the president of the United States. He was in awe, overcome. Suddenly, this tough six-foot-four man began weeping: He had come so far since Jim Crow and the Great Depression. He was choked up.
No one in the room was prepared for that reaction. They were dead silent, uncomfortable, unable to respond — except for Ronald Reagan. The president rose, walked over to the driver, extended his hand, breathed in, and said matter-of-factly, “Mr. Bullock, I understand you have a belt to show me?”
It was an “everyman” touch. And it put old Joe immediately at ease. Business-like, Joe showed the belt, and then he and Reagan began swapping stories, chatting away like old friends.
“The rest of us just faded away,” said Bill Clark, “as the two got along famously.” President and driver, remembering the old days.
Bullock left with a story to tell his fellow drivers, and his grandchildren. He died a few years later.
No, this anecdote is nothing dramatic. It’s not like challenging Gorbachev to tear down the wall. It’s simply another of many small stories I hear constantly about Ronald Reagan. This was a good president and a good man. The White House needs more of them. That’s a thought worth bearing in mind this February.
Just another dispatch from, as Steven Hayward dubbed it, the Age of Reagan:
From his Afterburner series on PJTV, Bill Whittle looks at what he calls “Super Bowl Democracy.” As Bill says, “In a country as huge as ours, representative democracy might be a crazy idea. But it’s so crazy it just might work — if citizens rule, not czars.”
From his weekly Instavision series on PJTV.com, Glenn Reynolds speaks with Marc Thiessen, former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, who believes that with Obama now at the helm, the CIA’s hands are now tied. And that America is, as the title of Thiessen’s new book implies, Courting Disaster.
Joe Hicks of PJTV.com opens up the Hicks File on James O’Keefe of BigGovernment.com, and the show trial the mainstream media have held for him. As the Beastie Boys would say, Joe’s going to set straight this Watergate!
If, as Hicks says, the MSM has had a hastily conceived show trial for James O’Keefe of BigGovernment.com. then the presiding judge has been David Shuster of MSNBC.com. Also taken from PJTV’s Trifecta, Bill Scott, Steve explore how Shuster’s rush to judgment has backfired badly.
Finally, from PJTV.com’s Post-American Bandstand, starring Alfonzo Rachel and its newest host, a man who hopes to parley his visit to the Blogosphere into a career in show business, and quite frankly, we think he just might make it someday. Ladies and Gentlemen, Pat Boone…
Produced by your humble Blogospheric prognosticator.
Found via Tim Blair, England’s Spectator has an article that should have broad appeal on both sides of the ocean. (The same ocean that almost a quarter of a century ago, Ted Danson ominously warned us that we only had ten years to save…)
Journalists are wont to moan that the slow death of newspapers will mean a disastrous loss of investigative reporting. The web is all very well, they say, but who will pay for the tenacious sniffing newshounds to flush out the real story? ‘Climategate’ proves the opposite to be true. It was amateur bloggers who scented the exaggerations, distortions and corruptions in the climate establishment; whereas newspaper reporters, even after the scandal broke, played poodle to their sources.
It was not Private Eye, or the BBC or the News of the World, but a retired electrical engineer in Northampton, David Holland, whose freedom-of-information requests caused the Climategate scientists to break the law, according to the Information Commissioner. By contrast, it has so far attracted little attention that the leaked emails of Climategate include messages from reporters obsequiously seeking ammunition against the sceptics. Other emails have shown reporters meekly changing headlines to suit green activists, or being threatened with ostracism for even reporting the existence of a sceptical angle: ‘Your reportage is very worrisome to most climate scientists,’ one normally alarmist reporter was told last year when he slipped briefly off message. ‘I sense that you are about to experience the “Big Cutoff” from those of us who believe we can no longer trust you, me included.’
So used are greens to sycophancy in the television studios that when they occasionally encounter even slightly hard questions they are outraged. Peter Sissons of the BBC: ‘I pointed out to [Caroline Lucas of the Green party] that the climate didn’t seem to be playing ball at the moment. We were having a particularly cold winter, even though carbon emissions were increasing. Indeed, there had been no warming for ten years, contradicting all the alarming computer predictions… Miss Lucas told me angrily that it was disgraceful that the BBC — the BBC! — should be giving any kind of publicity to those sort of views.’
Of course, reporters have been going native for decades. The difference is that they cannot now get away with it. When acid rain was all the rage in the 1980s, I was a science editor and I relayed all sorts of cataclysmic predictions from scientists and greens about its effect on forests. (Stern magazine said in 1984 that a third of Germany’s forests were already dead or dying and that experts believed all — all! — its conifers would be gone by 1990.) Today, we know that these predictions were wildly wrong and that far from dying out, forests in Germany, Sweden and North America actually thrived during that decade. I should have been more sceptical.
Yet, this time round, despite 20 years of being told they were not just factually but morally wrong, of being compared to Holocaust deniers, of being told they deserved to be tried for crimes against humanity, of being avoided at parties, climate sceptics seem to be growing in number and confidence by the day. What is the difference?
In a word, the internet. The Climate Consensus may hold the establishment — the universities, the media, big business, government — but it is losing the jungles of the web. After all, getting research grants, doing pieces to cameras and advising boards takes time. The very ostracism the sceptics suffered has left them free to do their digging untroubled by grant applications and invitations to Stockholm.
Update: Found via Stacy McCain, Ace of Spades on how the twains are meeting — “We are in a weird time where the lowest-ranked cable TV shows are now actually more poorly rated than the biggest blogs”:
As you all know, when you pick a fight for attention, you punch up, not down. You take a shot at someone bigger, with a bigger audience. You don’t get into spats with people with smaller audiences, because while that helps them, it doesn’t really help you very much.Keith Olbermann is going out of his way to mention Hot Air, even when Ed Morrissey offers a pretty routine bit of commentary about a non-issue. It’s really just an excuse to mention Hot Air.
Because Hot Air is bigger than Keith Olbermann is.
So, why does Hot Air return the favor, flattering a guy with a smaller audience? Well, probably jut because it’s TV, and that seems like it should be bigger and more influential than a blog. But it’s not.
We are in a weird time where the lowest-ranked cable TV shows are now actually more poorly rated than the biggest blogs. And it’s weird, now, because we’re just not used to it. We’re still thinking TV is big leagues, blogging is for wannabes.
But that is changing.
Heh. Indeed. Read the whole thing, as one blogging pioneer is wont to say.
Related: From the asymmetric warfare of the Global Warming Guerrillas we take you to the front lines of…Snowpocalypse Now!
Personally, I’d prefer to spend the hereafter in something a bit more formal, but to each his own. As to the president’s remarks, as Cuffy Meigs writes, this is definitely a “creepy anecdote fail:”
What is going on with the rise of a leftist aristocracy? Al Gore become a multimillionaire railing about reducing our lifestyle in accord with the pseudoscience of his climate-change gurus? John Edwards built a mansion to better voice his sermons on “two nations”? From his estates, John Kerry limoed and jetted in Kennedy-fashion to warn us about a cruel jobless vision of George Bush’s America?
A zillionaire Gates family, that has ensured there will be no federal inheritance taxes on their $50 billion, lectures on the benefits of higher inheritance taxes; a speculating Soros expounds on capitalism’s sins; a billionaire, tax-savvy Buffet laments the too-low federal income tax; a multimillionaire, low-ratings Katie Courac bristles at Palinism as her network lays off hoi polloi. And on and on.
Yet rarely is voiced the common denominator. High Liberalism is now a psychological manifestation, by which the very rich, immune to both the realities of tough living and the hurt of high taxes, finds solace, self-worth, penance even, by sympathy for big government entitlement for the less fortunate whom they connive hourly to avoid. Prep schools are jammed with the children of those who damn charter schools and vouchers; environmentalism’s most articulate advocates of small is better live in ways undreamed by the masses they wish to rein in. The greatest advocates of public expenditure, whether a Rangel, Geithner, or Daschle, are quite busy ensuring that they themselves will not have to pay for it all.
A few days ago, Kate McMillan of the Small Dead Animals blog places Katie Couric’s recent fashion spread and accompanying video in Harper’s Bazaar into context:
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
Drudge Report – CBSNEWS anchorwoman and 60 MINUTES contributor Katie Couric faces a dramatic pay cut at the network, insiders tell the DRUDGE REPORT. CBS boss Les Moonves is determined to save money and trim expenses — from top to bottom — at the former crown jewel of broadcasting.
Mediaite – Fox News had its best January in the history of the network, and was the only cable news network to grow year-to-year.
