It’s sort of a zen koan (or Zen Cohen, for all you Brothers Judd fans, not to mention a paraphrase of an old Lileksism): as Key Luke would have said on ABC’s old Kung Fu series, tell me, Grasshopper, where does the MSM end and the DNC begin?
NPR brass reacted negatively after veteran reporter Nina Totenberg consistently referred to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel by his first name only.
Henceforth, the White House Chief of Staff will be known only as “Rahm Emanuel.” The customary second reference using only the person’s last name is being set aside in this case because Rahm is rarely referred to as “Emanuel” in Washington circles.
Shepard said she disagreed with the special second reference for Emanuel and thinks he should simply be called by his last name on second mention, like most others referred to on NPR.
This was no rookie mistake by Totenberg and NPR reacted quickly to make it clear that all reporters need to use both the first and last name of their subjects. Even though the report wasn’t favorable towards Emanuel in this case it still calls into question why Totenberg felt comfortable enough to refer to him by his first name only. Just how chummy is Totenberg to Emanuel and the White House?
So much for reporter objectivity and credibility at NPR.
And that’s on top of the infamous “David Axelrod — well, we loved you in the HBO documentary, and umm, uhh, we’ll always have the New York-23rd” moment between NBC’s Andrea Mitchell and Axelrod earlier this month:
There may be a major silver lining for conservatives and for America’s future thanks to the foreign and domestic policies of President Obama and the Democrat-controlled House and Senate: For the first time in their lives, millions of Americans are coming to understand the left.
It is difficult to overstate how important this is. For decades, the left has largely controlled the news media, the arts, the universities and the entertainment media. And vast numbers of Americans have imbibed these leftist messages and the leftist critiques of conservatives. What these Americans have never been able to do is to see what the left would actually do if in power.
Of course, all one had to do was look at California and see how a left-wing legislature brought the country’s largest state economy to near insolvency and bankruptcy, chased away many of its most productive citizens, and wasted tens of billions of dollars thanks in large measure to union domination of the state’s politics.
But most Americans do not observe other states. Most Americans are preoccupied with their lives and, unfortunately, with what is on television.
And speaking of which, Allie Duzett of Accuracy In Media notes that TV and the rest of the legacy media are doing damndest to keep the information floodgates as hermetically sealed as possible:
Leave it to the New York Times to put soccer fixing above revelations about faked global warming data. As of Monday’s edition, there has been no follow up-instead, they carried a piece on the Sunday opinion page calling for the Senate to do more about climate change.
However, to be fair, many other papers mentioned it even less.
The Express, a condensed version of the Washington Post, had this headline on the front page: “Hot Topic: Warming worse than feared, scientists say.” The article discusses how global warming “has exceeded worst fears,” and calls for more action to combat climate change. There is an inset article two sentences long about the emails-mentioning that the emails exist and that the “researchers” involved “say the emails have been taken out of context.” This is hardly giving the emails the press coverage or consideration they deserve.
ABC News and the Washington Times have chosen to run the same article from the Associated Press, apparently not finding the story worth investigating further on their own. At least they’re running the story at all: CNN’s website has yet to mention the emails.
It is not too surprising to find that many “scientists” have been strategically promoting false data when it comes to global warming; it is far more surprising that major news networks are completely ignoring one of the largest scandals the modern scientific world has ever seen.
The fact is, this information could completely destroy any credibility global warming alarmists once claimed. And with the American economy hanging in the balance with cap and trade legislation, it is dismaying, though not terribly surprising, that major news organizations are not plastering this information on every front page. It is shameful that “respectable” newspapers and networks are devoting more time to the Gosselins, Taylor Swift and Twilight than to covering the story that could make or break our constitutional republic.
Not at all — it’s only shameful to the legacy media if they believe that their most important function is to disseminate information, not withhold it. Perhaps it was an entirely unconscious collective decision, but the MSM, at least at the top of its food chain, long ago decided that their real job was the latter.
The White House not only deliberately misled Congress on Walpin’s firing, they also withheld these new documents until after Grassley and Issa made their initial report on the investigation on Friday. As Byron York notes, that takes the traditional Friday-night document dump to a whole new level. It also completely refutes any claim on transparency and openness from this administration.
The new information shows that Obama fired Walpin for political purposes, not for cause. The White House also broke the law, at least initially, by not giving Congress the proper notification before terminating Walpin (they adhered to the regulation after being called on this violation by postponing Walpin’s termination date). The firing appears to have been motivated to protect an Obama ally (Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson) from having allegations of using federal funds to pay off employees and avoid sexual harassment charges exposed. The White House essentially smeared Walpin with completely unsubstantiated allegations of senility to undermine his credibility, once Walpin went public. One might think that the national media would take an interest in this, but as York also notes, their interest has never been very intense at all.
Inspectors general exist to check abuses of power and corruption, regardless of the party in power. An attack on them, especially one so nakedly political and potentially corrupt as Walpin’s firing, is an attack on accountability and citizen government. This case should be headlining major media outlets — and if the current president was a Republican, it no doubt would be.
Hey, they have more important stories to cover, as Kyle Smith writes in the New York Post:
Liberals in the media make heinous personal attacks, dress up quibbles and debating as “fact-checking” and compare her to such noxious harridans as Evita Peron and Madonna. Newsweek went with a cover photo of a picture of her in running shorts to degrade her to the level of a spokesmodel and Stephen Colbert broke character to call her book “a steaming pile of s – - -.” They called her a “deeply disturbed person” (Andrew Sullivan) “unhinged” (ibid), a “delusional fantasist” (ibid; Andrew’s been a busy lad) and even — this is really low — “the leader of the Republican party.”
To all of these liberal attacks I say: well played, my friends. Take a bow.
Hate-drunk Democrats are possibly not even aware of what a savvy political move they are carrying out.
By attacking the former governor of a state smaller by population than Westchester County, a woman whose chances of being the next president are about the same as Nancy Pelosi’s, Democrats aren’t wasting their time at all. They are distracting conservatives and changing the subject.
Conservatives should be, but aren’t, completely focused on one idea. It’s liberalism, stupid.
Last week, Obama looked exceptionally weak, naive and disingenuous, even for him: He got a knee in the face when he bowed to China; he admitted his promise to close Gitmo by January was the bloviation conservatives have always said it was; his attorney general invited terrorists to bring their Cirque du Jihad to New York so they can put the US national security apparatus on trial (and added that Obama wasn’t even part of the decision); the claims about stimulus-provided jobs turned out to involve lots of fictitious work in nonexistent congressional districts; a second Democratic senator threatened to help filibuster the health bill; and Afghanistan and Iran grew more dire as each hour brought the president inching ever closer to thinking about meeting to discuss the possibility of suggesting the next half-hearted response.
So what preoccupied the nation? Bill Belichick’s 4th and two call. And the book tour of an unemployed former governor of a very small state.
“A Gandhi-following, peace-loving, free-spirited vegetarian who was adopted at birth has discovered the worst possible thing a son could find out about his father – his dad is Charles Manson.”
Do we know if Manson digs Ghandi? If so, dad’s got two out of three above attributes covered.
Today marks the 46th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy. Back in 2007, I interviewed James Piereson about his then-new book, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, which looked at the enormous cognitive dissonance that descended upon the left in its wake.
And it may be permanent: Piereson has a new article comparing the left’s inability to process who shot JFK with the motivations of Nadal Hassan, the Fort Hood shooter at the Weekly Standard. Click here to read it.
Back in September, we referenced the World Wildlife Federation’s botched advertisement associating global warming with 9/11; this ad by the appropriately named “Plane Stupid” attempts to do much the same. What else does one think of when watching bodies fall from the sky in an urban environment filled with high rises? At least until ascertaining that those bodies are the wintry cousins of Yogi, Boo Boo, Smokey, and their Build-A-Bear brethren?
Update: Found in the comments of Tim Blair’s blog, scientists, circus performers, and astute urban developers are already teaming up to provide innovative solutions to the nation’s plummeting bear market:
John Boot and Christian Toto note that the new movie version of The Blind Side, the enjoyable recent football book by Michael Lewis of Liar’s Poker fame, contains a classic Hollywood sucker punch. As Christian writes:
Here’s the scene: Bullock’s character is waiting in line to speak to someone about her new son Michael’s legal status.
Fed up, she cuts to the front of the line to ask a question:
“We have been sitting around here for over an hour and when I look around all I see are people shooting the bull and drinking coffee … who’s in charge here?”
The bemused woman behind the desk points to the wall, where a picture of Bush is hanging.
We’ve all been in long lines before, be it at the DMV or other governmental offices. And it doesn’t matter which party – or person – is occupying the White House at the moment.
So the joke makes no sense. All it does is deflate a feel-good movie for no good reason. Maybe the filmmakers realized with Bush out of office time is running out to throw spitballs at Hollywood’s favorite target.
Hollywood is high school and if you want to sit at the cool kids’ table (i.e. work) you better fit in, and if you’ve been involved in the writing, directing or producing of a film sympathetic towards the most hated demographic (yes, even more hated than terrorists — again, watch the product) in the 9-0 zip code, you had better inoculate yourself.
And that’s what the gratuitous, unnecessary, jarring, take-you-out-of-the-movie shot at Bush is: an inoculation. The filmmakers want to work again; they want to be invited to all the right parties. But if you’re remembered as the perso involved in bringing to life a movie only Glenn Beck could love, no matter how big of a hit, that’s not a good thing on the ole’ resume’.
There are notable exceptions, but working in Hollywood — an industry built on social interaction — means getting along with Leftists, and Leftists are religious, regional and ideological bigots of the worst order. The smart people involved in the making of “The Blind Side” knew the Bush shot was bad storytelling — was what what John Boot described as ”a non-sequitur nonpareil” — they just felt, for whatever reason (their own bigotry or career survival), that it was worth it.
Hollywood is not money or profit-driven. This is an industry engaged in an ideological war with traditional conservative America that doesn’t mind making a profit, but never will at the expense of the cause. Everyone involved in the making of “Blind Side” knew an unnecessary partisan shot at Bush would turn people off. They all knew they were insulting the very audience the film was marketed at for no reason other than to insult them. But there was absolutely no way in hell this thing was going to see the light of day without something for the Hollywood bigots to snicker over.
As John writes, “This is their sandbox, and there’s a ring to kiss if you want to play.”
Slate magazine is just one of the countless media outlets convulsing with St. Vitus’ Dance over that demonic succubus Sarah Palin. In its reader forum, The Fray, one supposed Palinophobe took dead aim at the former Alaska governor’s writing chops, excerpting the following sentence from her book:
“The apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn’t work, so that visitors had to call ahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle.”
Other readers pounced like wolf-sized Dobermans on an intruder. One guffawed, “That sentence by Sarah Palin could be entered into the annual Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest. It could have a chance at winning a (sic) honorable mention, at any rate.”
But soon, the original contributor confessed: “I probably should have mentioned that the sentence quoted above was not written by Sarah Palin. It’s taken from the first paragraph of ‘Dreams From My Father,’ written by Barack Obama.”
The ruse should have been allowed to fester longer, but the point was made nonetheless: Some people hate Palin first and ask questions later.
Palin’s book was rejected by at least one local book chain in the increasingly reprimitivized Bay Area; PJM’s David Steinberg looks at what titles they carry instead. (Hint: Rosie O’Donnell and Charlie Sheen should be pleased.) Meanwhile, the legacy media, which goes to 11 when it’s time investigate Plain’s autobiography (unlike Obama’s), has taken to picking on her 17-year old fans.
After introducing [George] Lopez on her CNN Headline News program last night, [Joy] Behar played a clip of Lopez’s HBO special in which he said, “There are a lot of politicians that would be Latinos and a lot now who are Latino. Sarah Palin, Latina. Believe me. She’s got all the signs. She works and her husband don’t.” [sic -- Ed]
Later in the segment, after commenting about Palin’s lack of experience, Lopez stated, “I mean, the concept of Todd Palin being a stay-at-home dad-listen Joy, when I was a kid, those guys were called bums.”
“Uh-huh. They’re still called bums,” agreed Behar.
There’s liberal hypocrisy on the part of New York Times economics columnist and left-wing blog-follower Paul Krugman in his Monday nytimes.com blog post, “Proposed extensions of Godwin’s Law.”
Leading into a discussion of how he thinks people should discuss inflation and interest rates, Krugman said:
Godwin’s Law — which says that in any sufficiently long online discussion, someone will compare his opponent to Hitler — is often interpreted to mean that if you do, in fact, start making Nazi comparisons, you’ve lost the argument and can no longer be taken seriously. I’m all for that. (Does this mean that we should no longer take any significant figure in the Republican Party seriously? Yes, it does.)
Not only is that way overstated (Krugman provides no actual examples), it’s also pretty bold, given that Krugman takes seriously and often utilizes ideas from left-wing blog sites like Daily Kos, where comparing President George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler was pretty much the password for entry.
And such concern for civil debate didn’t stop Krugman from comparing conservative host Rush Limbaugh to Communist dictator Joseph Stalin in an April 13 column:
Speaking of Mr. Limbaugh: the most impressive thing about his role right now is the fealty he is able to demand from the rest of the right. The abject apologies he has extracted from Republican politicians who briefly dared to criticize him have been right out of Stalinist show trials.
Apparently, in Rich’s mind, because conservatives thought — accurately as it turned out — that Dede Scozzafava, running for Congress in New York’s 23rd District was a Republican in Name Only, and they preferred a more conservative candidate, that made them…Stalinists!
On the other hand, it was rather refreshing to see a journalist with the New York Times use the word pejoratively. Needless to say, that hasn’t always been the case, as we’ll explore in the latest edition of Silicon Graffiti, including:
Thomas Friedman’s love for Big Brother in China and Cuba.
I’ll say one thing about the Hollywood studio system of the 1940s and ’50s: every actor and actress had the occasional bomb, but you rarely heard Cary Grant, John Wayne, Bogie or Bacall blaming the customers when their picture tanked:
Another day, another nugget of awesomeness from Megan Fox.
The actress tells The New York Times that her movie “Jennifer’s Body” tanked because “the movie is about a man-eating, cannibalistic lesbian cheerleader, and that pretty much eliminates middle America.”
Which sounds like a repeat of the blame-the-booboisie quote uttered by the screenwriter of the craptacular sequel to Basic Instinct when it bombed, as City Journal’s Stefan Kanfer wrote in 2006:
Paul Verhoeven, director of the first Basic Instinct, made in 1992, avers that politics in the U.S. of A. have taken the fun out of eros. Indeed, insists the Dutch native, “anything that is erotic has been banned in the United States. Look at the people at the top. We are living under a government that is constantly hammering out Christian values.” Scenarist Nicholas Meyer (Fatal Attraction; The Human Stain) agrees. “We’re in a big puritanical mode. Now it’s like the McCarthy era, except it’s not ‘Are you a communist?’ but have you ever put sex in a movie?”
On which planet do these gentlemen live? It is difficult to determine from their remarks. In an epoch when XXX rated videos are available at the local DVD store, when the Internet contains countless pornographic sites, when surveys show that more Americans hear suggestive language than ever before, when celebrities promote oral sex for teenagers, when nudity and semi-nudity are a part of prime time programming, it is impossible to reconcile the opinions of Messrs. Verhoeven and Meyer with the facts of life.
Still, we must congratulate them for their originality. It used to be fashionable to hold the Jews responsible for everything that went wrong. Blaming Christianity is a new one.
Heh. So why didn’t you take your low expectations for what Americans will accept at the box office into account before you made the movie?
Last week, when I was at the supermarket checkout line, I came across this cover of Time:
Main Street hates Wall Street? Isn’t such a broad “lumper” of a question rather specious to begin with? Despite the best efforts of the president, plenty of people on Main Street are still rather prudent investors, keeping their stockbroker, financial planner or Charles Schwab representative gainfully employed, if not quite as well off as he was a few years ago. But otherwise, along with Time’s helpful cover-scribbles, doesn’t the question sort of answer itself? When you demonize a group of businessmen like that, isn’t the answer obvious?
And yes, that’s an actual photo, unlike some used by Newsweek affiliates. As of this summer, Newsweek’s newsstand sales were down to about 66,000 readers an issue. (In contrast, Matt Drudge, Glenn Reynolds and the guys at Hot Air have already shot way past that number before they wake up in the morning.) But I’m not sure why I’m supposed to look at that photo of Palin and automatically assume there’s a problem — except that she’s been demonized by the MSM for the last 14 months or so. (Employing armies of “fact checkers” who otherwise apparently have been bereft of work since, oh, mid-January or so.)
Which oddly enough makes sense. For this to be true….
AtReal Clear Politics, Sean Trende writes, “You only get to elect the first black President once, and governing a coalition of suburbanites, poor blacks, and upper class liberals isn’t easy. It is hard to keep that enthusiasm up. And with the Jacksonian wing of the party gone, if that enthusiasm dissipates, or if one of the coalition groups becomes disgruntled and starts to shuffle out the door, the party isn’t left with much”:
The historical base of the Democratic Party for two centuries has long been what Jay Cost and I call Jacksonians: Culturally conservative, hawkish, and populist whites located throughout the South and Border states. They began breaking away from Democrats in the 1950s and 1960s – their reaction to the Party’s embrace of unions, blacks and liberals is a story is so well known there’s no need to rehash it here.
But this group remained at least in play for the Democrats. Clinton inherited a coalition consisting of minorities, liberals, urban voters, and a decent remnant of Jacksonian voters in the Ohio River Valley and the South, who still preferred a moderate-to-conservative Democrat to a Republican. This coalition became a majority coalition when Clinton used a combination of fiscal conservatism and social moderation to bring suburban voters on board. This was a huge innovation for Democrats; suburbs like Nassau County, NY, Orange County, CA and Fairfax County, VA had fueled the rise of the Republican parties in those states. Clinton moved them substantially toward his side. This coalition allowed him to win by eight points in 1996; absent Perot and a last-minute fundraising scandal, he probably would have won by more.
Clinton intuited that suburban voters are, generally speaking, culturally cosmopolitan – they don’t like it when you call someone “macaca,” and aren’t crazy about the religious right. But they’re generally not particularly socially liberal either, and are fans of “law and order.” They like taxes low and appreciate economic growth, but like good schools and a clean environment. Having to balance a bunch of spending priorities with somewhat limited income in their daily lives, balanced budgets are the ultimate “good government” indicator for these voters.
Clinton delivered on all of these issues, keeping tax increases fairly small, and balancing the budget for much of his term. In so doing – and this is very important – he re-branded the Democrats as the party of fiscal responsibility, economic growth, moderate taxes, and smart government.
Meanwhile, Andy McCarthy writes that President Obama is playing to his radical leftwing base, not the center, with his decision to prosecute Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a New York-based civilian trial:
Today’s announcement that KSM and other top al-Qaeda terrorists will be transferred to Manhattan federal court for civilian trials neatly fits this hidden agenda. Nothing results in more disclosures of government intelligence than civilian trials. They are a banquet of information, not just at the discovery stage but in the trial process itself, where witnesses — intelligence sources — must expose themselves and their secrets.
Let’s take stock of where we are at this point. KSM and his confederates wanted to plead guilty and have their martyrs’ execution last December, when they were being handled by military commission. As I said at the time, we could and should have accommodated them. The Obama administration could still accommodate them. After all, the president has not pulled the plug on all military commissions: Holder is going to announce at least one commission trial (for Nashiri, the Cole bomber) today.
Moreover, KSM has no defense. He was under American indictment for terrorism for years before there ever was a 9/11, and he can’t help himself but brag about the atrocities he and his fellow barbarians have carried out.
So: We are now going to have a trial that never had to happen for defendants who have no defense. And when defendants have no defense for their own actions, there is only one thing for their lawyers to do: put the government on trial in hopes of getting the jury (and the media) spun up over government errors, abuses and incompetence. That is what is going to happen in the trial of KSM et al. It will be a soapbox for al-Qaeda’s case against America. Since that will be their “defense,” the defendants will demand every bit of information they can get about interrogations, renditions, secret prisons, undercover operations targeting Muslims and mosques, etc., and — depending on what judge catches the case — they are likely to be given a lot of it. The administration will be able to claim that the judge, not the administration, is responsible for the exposure of our defense secrets. And the circus will be played out for all to see — in the middle of the war. It will provide endless fodder for the transnational Left to press its case that actions taken in America’s defense are violations of international law that must be addressed by foreign courts. And the intelligence bounty will make our enemies more efficient at killing us.
Clinton’s first two years in office were nearly as bad as Obama’s first year has been; it was only the election of a center-right GOP to both houses of Congress that curbed his excesses. But at least he had actual executive experience as governor before winning the White House. Obama has had none, and his lack of experience, and inability to make decisions, is beginning to snowball against him, and badly.
“I have been a Republican my entire life, I will be a Republican until I die. I believe in the Republican party that stands for less government interference in the lives of individuals. I believe in self-sufficiency versus government dependence. I believe in lower taxes, less government regulation, I believe in less government spending.”
“Speaking with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Scozzafava warned Republicans that “you have ideology that’s really not based on any sort of substance that can move an agenda forward, that can really help people in this country.”
There’s a memorable scene inLawrence of Arabia between Omar Sharif’s character “Sherif Ali” and Arthur Kennedy, who plays “Jackson Bentley”, a thinly disguised version of one of the real-life Lawrence’s biggest promoters, American journalist Lowell Thomas:
Bentley: What are you learning from this?
Sherif Ali: Politics.
Bentley: You’ll be a democracy in this country? You gonna have a parliament?
Sherif Ali: I will tell you that when I have a country.
[BEAT]
Did I answer well?
Bentley: You answered without saying anything. That’s politics.
With that in mind, watch Robin Carnahan, a liberal secretary of state (and would-be US senator) from the centerist midwestern state of Missouri dissemble for nearly three minutes without saying anything about PelosiCare or the Stupak Amendment:
For those who are wondering why an army base of all places is, effectively, a gun-free zone, the Washington Timesnotes its origins:
Among President Clinton’s first acts upon taking office in 1993 was to disarm U.S. soldiers on military bases. In March 1993, the Army imposed regulations forbidding military personnel from carrying their personal firearms and making it almost impossible for commanders to issue firearms to soldiers in the U.S. for personal protection. For the most part, only military police regularly carry firearms on base, and their presence is stretched thin by high demand for MPs in war zones.
Because of Mr. Clinton, terrorists would face more return fire if they attacked a Texas Wal-Mart than the gunman faced at Fort Hood, home of the heavily armed and feared 1st Cavalry Division. That’s why a civilian policewoman from off base was the one whose marksmanship ended Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s rampage.
Everyone wants to keep people safe – and no one denies Mr. Clinton’s good intentions. The problem is that law-abiding good citizens, not criminals, are the ones who obey those laws. Bans end up disarming potential victims and not criminals. Rather than making places safe for victims, we unintentionally make them safe for the criminal – or in this case, the terrorist.
The wife of one of the soldiers shot at Fort Hood understands all too well. In an interview on CNN Monday night, Anchor John Roberts asked Mandy Foster how she felt about her husband’s upcoming deployment to Afghanistan. Ms. Foster responded: “At least he’s safe there and he can fire back, right?”
The First Amendment states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” But Nancy Pelosi (D-North Pole) just blurted out that her socialized medicine proposal is her “Christmas Present to the American people.”
Obviously it’s time to bring in the ACLU to put an end to the medieval religious fantasies of the faith-based Christianist reactionaries currently running Congress. Perhaps having committed such an egregious thoughtcrime against the people of San Francisco and Berkley, Pelosi will do the deed herself.
Incidentally, does this mean that those who don’t celebrate Christmas can opt out without going to jail or receiving a lump of coal — sustainably mined for use clean coal facilities of course — in their stockings?
Newsbusters’ Clay Waters notes an interesting rhetorical tic in the Gray Lady’s coverage of the left. I wonder if this phrase has its own entry in the Times’ style manual:
New York Times reporter Peter Baker questioned whether President Obama’s soaring rhetoric (”the most gifted orator of his generation”) was still getting through in his Sunday Week in Review piece “The Words That Once Soared,” and even let Obama aides suggest the president’s Cairo speech“was responsible for Iranians taking to the streets of Tehran to protest a disputed election.”
As the most gifted orator of his generation, President Obama finds speechmaking perhaps his most potent political tool. It propelled him to national prominence in 2004 and to the White House in 2008. And whenever he needs to calm economic fears or revive stalled health care legislation, he takes to the lectern.
The Times finds the Democratic party to be a veritable symposium of “gifted orators.” Obama’s already been called that three times before in the Times, the first instance coming all the way back on March 19, 2006 in a story by Anne Kornblut, before he was even running for president.
Mass. Gov. Deval Patrick joined Obama as a “fellow gifted orator” in a March 27, 2008 story by Abby Goodnough.
In a March 1, 2009 Times magazine story, Matt Bai said that unlike conservative Republican Newt Gingrich, Obama was a “gifted orator.”
In fact, a Nexis search and a nytimes.com search suggest that no Republican has earned the Times’s “gifted orator” appellation, not even Ronald Reagan, although the archives get fuzzier pre-1981.
Going back a little, President Bill Clinton was a “gifted orator” in October 1994, less than a month before he orated his party out of the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years.
It’s no surprise that former New York governor and perpetual Democratic presidential teaser Mario Cuomo was called a “gifted orator” in May 1992.
It may come as more of a surprise that screaming Howard Dean was considered a “gifted orator” in a June 2003 story, again by Matt Bai.
Why, it’s like the Times takes sides, or something!
At Big Hollywood, S.T. Karnick notes that, as he calls it, Robert Zemeckis’s “motion-capture-animation version of the Charles Dickens classic A Christmas Carol” had a disappointing opening weekend. It came in first at the box office, but at 31 million dollars in ticket sales, about $14 million short of analysts’ expectations. And that’s put Jim Carrey, the film’s star, in a rather humbug (sorry) mood:
Jim Carrey’s noisiness appears to be wearing quite thin, and a film that features him as not only the protagonist but also three other characters sounds like far too much of a no longer good thing. Carrey would do well to follow the path of the equally obnoxious Robin Williams and move on to more serious film roles, even if it kills his career. Yes, I’m well aware that Carrey’s occasional serious performances have been pretty awful, but he’s dead either way, and it would be best to die with honor instead of ignominy.
Carrey is following in Williams’s footsteps in one way, however: the making of idiotic political pronouncements. Talking with the Chicago Tribune to promote A Christmas Carol a few days before the film’s release, Carrey released the following burst of political flatulence:
“I was thinking about it this morning, how this story ties into everything we’re going through,” says Carrey, who, thanks to the technology, plays Scrooge as well as the three ghosts haunting him. “Every construct we’ve built in American life is falling apart. Why? Because of personal greed and ambition. Capitalism without regulation can’t protect us against personal greed.. . .
Making certain that many people reading the interview will resolutely avoid seeing the film, Carrey describes the protagonist as follows:
“Scrooge is the ultimate example of self-loathing,” Carrey says, noting that, after playing the title character in Ron Howard’s “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” he was merely “going to the source” in fleshing out Scrooge.
“Beware the unloved, I always say,” Carrey continues. “They’re the ones that end up being the mean guys. It comes from that deep, spiritual acid reflux within them. With Scrooge it infects his whole being.”
Whereas Dickens presented a reasonably nuanced view of the issues the story brings up, and did so with an appropriate narrative tone, Carrey makes the latest film version sound like a ham-fisted socialist diatribe, hardly a strategy for drawing middle American families in great numbers.
Zemeckis, for his part, avoided making any big political claims about the film. That’s the wise course, and given the already annoying qualities suggested by the commercials and trailers for the film, the last thing his version of A Christmas Carol needs is for its star to blunder around the media with claims that this energetic fantasy is any kind of brief for socialism.
Carrey rails against “personal greed and ambition” and “capitalism without regulation” — but few have been blessed more by its benefits. Or as Jim Treacher quips, “Guess who hates capitalism now? The first guy to make $20 million for saying words & making faces in front of a camera.”
Dubbing Al Gore “The Thinking Man’s Thinking Man”, Newsweek has yet another of its unintentionally ironic headlines. (At least we think the irony is unintentional, although Conquest’s Third Law is always a potential factor.)
And while we won’t say a word about the inherent sexism in the headline coming from such an archliberal publication, at Newsbusters, Tim Graham writes:
Permit a late word or two on Newsweek’s thoroughly in-the-tank cover story for Al Gore. Sharon Begley oozed about Gore’s favorite quote in his book – but never seems to note that Gore’s “philosopher” expert is a Marxist. It comes near the very end of the piece:
His favorite quote in [his new book] Our Choice is from the philosopher Theodor Adorno (1903–1969): “The conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power … has attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false.”
Adorno, and his colleagues in what is called the “Frankfurt School,” are Marxists. Al Gore and his liberal admirers in the press (see this Seattle Times dispatch) aspire to make it through Adorno’s impenetrable prose. British journalist Alastair McKay brightly reported that in Scotland in 2006, Gore lauded the entire school of Marxists:
“After World War Two there were a group of very thoughtful, humane, decent philosophers – Germans – who were so horrified, humiliated, shamed by what had happened in Germany that they became what is known as the Frankfurt School – Jurgen Habermas is probably the best known.
They devoted themselves over decades to exploring the question: what in the hell happened? And one of them, a philosopher named Theodore Adorno – conducted a philosophical autopsy of the Weimar and the emergence of the Third Reich. And he identified the first significant symptom of their descent into hell. He said this: ‘All questions of fact became questions of power’.
Gore’s entire construction of the global-warming debate is between reason (that’s the we’re-almost-roasted-marshmallows doom) and unreason, superstition, and capitalist propaganda (that’s conservatives). We face a “democracy crisis” because people have failed so far to bow to his genius. After a windy account of how the Enlightenment and the printing press allowed a new “rule of reason,” Gore launched into an attack on television for ruining democracy:
“The information ecology defined by the printing press was displaced 40 ears ago in my country by the television, and it’s now so dominant that the average American watches television for four hours and 39 minutes a day. It has a quasi-hypnotic effect [It certainly did on Al -- he launched his own little-watched TV channel in 2005 -- Ed], and the internet’s a great source of hope and it replicates that meritocracy of ideas but it does not have that hypnotic effect that television has.
“I see the internet as a source of hope. To use the Star Wars analogy, the rebellion is alive and well on the internet on some far galaxy, connected to ours, and it is growing, and I do believe that it is changing the operation of our political dialogue, democratising it, opening it up, so that questions of fact become questions of truth instead of power, so that there’s not censorship of global warming studies.”
Notice how Gore is always making conservatives into the unspeakable evil in his analogies: the Nazis, in the Frankfurt School analogy, and Darth Vader’s forces in the Star Wars analogy. Press him, and he denies the analogy is exact; but that’s how he wants his liberal allies to feel about themselves, that they are the anti-Nazi Skywalkers in this perilous ecological era, fighting “the Assault on Reason.”
Apropos of nothing, I wonder if Gore, who spent time in South Vietnam as a young U.S. Army journalist realizes that he’s rooting for George Lucas’s sci-fi stand-ins for the NVA?
And the Frankfurt School? Why does that name ring a bell? Oh yeah…
(If you’re pressed for time, scroll about six minutes into their appearance in Bill Whittle’s must-watch video from late August.)
Update: Thomas Sowell recently wrote, “My first column, more than 30 years ago, was titled ‘The Profits of Doom.’ Recent news stories about the millions of dollars that Al Gore has made out of his ‘global warming’ hysteria suggest that some things haven’t changed much in three decades.” Meanwhile, George Will wonders if there now exists a “Bad Climate for Global Worriers.”
After introducing [George] Lopez on her CNN Headline News program last night, [Joy] Behar played a clip of Lopez’s HBO special in which he said, “There are a lot of politicians that would be Latinos and a lot now who are Latino. Sarah Palin, Latina. Believe me. She’s got all the signs. She works and her husband don’t.” [sic -- Ed]
