“Pic(s) of the Day: Andrea Mitchell Tries Desperately to Ambush Palin at Book Signing, Stopped by the Police….”
“Sarah Palin stalked by rogue liberal media madwoman.”
Jim Treacher asks, “You guys saw Single White Female, right?”
Related: I’m sure Andrea — not to mention Andrew Sullivan — will be doing plenty of counter-surveillance espionage from this location.
As Jonah Goldberg writes, “Palinophobes Hate First, Ask Questions Later”:
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.
Update: And stay at home fathers:
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.
Update: More CNN classiness here.
James Pethokoukis writes, “Here comes Sarah Palin and the anti-Wall Street GOP:
Don’t interpret passage of the watered-down Kanjorski amendment as the peak of the “break up the banks” movement. It may be about to get some new allies on the right, folks tired of Big Government, Big Money and crony capitalism.
For the moment, though, it was arguably the best that Representative Paul Kanjorski, a Pennsylvania Democrat, [and Mr. New New Deal himself -- Ed] could have gotten through the House Financial Services Committee. All the committee Republicans and even some of the Democrats voted against it. And even in its much-diminished state, the Kanjorksi amendment would likely be weakened further in the Senate. At the same time, the Obama administration seems little interested in such pre-emptive powers.
Wall Street, however, is hardly getting any more popular with Main Street. The Goldman Sachs Apology Tour is evidence of that. And there are mid-term elections in less than a year. Republican candidates will probably do well as high unemployment continues to drive voter anger at incumbents. As Gallup diplomatically puts it, “Republicans seem well-positioned to win back some of their congressional losses in 2006 and 2008.” More accurately, fear of losing the House is now running high among congressional Dems.
And all those new Republicans are likely to be infused with the ethos of the Tea Party movement: anti-TARP, anti-Fed (the House GOP is already there on this), anti-bailouts and anti-Wall Street. It could be a group of newcomers, as John McCain recently said, that is populist, protectionist when it comes to China and the yuan and pro-financial regulation.
Sarah Palin could be a harbinger. Although she diligently promotes the wonder-working power of Reaganomics in her autobiography, she also warns about “the return of corporatism – government collusion and co-option of big business.” [More on corporatism here -- Ed]
Nice of Time magazine to unwittingly prime the pump for such a campaign:
As the Gray Lady would say, climate changes*; women, children, minorities, dogs, email, and the earth’s core hardest hit.
(Headline via the cool, objective journalists at AP.)
Found via the #TCOT Report, AOL’s Daily Finance Website claims a bit of chicanery may have been involved in how Newsweek obtained its latest cover image:
What on earth was Sarah Palin thinking when she posed in a pair of teeny-tiny gym shorts for a photograph that ended up on the cover of Newsweek — a cover she has called “sexist”? Perhaps she was thinking that her image would only appear in the magazine she was posing for, Runner’s World, and nowhere else, at least not for months and months. If so, she had good reason — since, as DailyFinance has learned, the photographer who shot the picture violated his contract by reselling them to Newsweek.
That photographer, Brian Adams, could not immediately be reached, and his agent, Kelly Price, declined to comment, saying, “I keep all of my clients’ business private.” But a spokeswoman for Runner’s World confirms that Adams’s contract contained a clause stipulating that his photos of Palin would be under embargo for a period of one year following publication — meaning until August 2010. “Runner’s World did not provide Newsweek with its cover image,” the spokeswoman said. “It was provided to Newsweek by the photographer’s stock agency, without Runner’s World’s knowledge or permission.” The spokeswoman declined to say whether Runner’s World intends to respond to Adams’s breach of contract with legal action.
I guess Jill Greenberg had another assignment that week.
In addition to the sexism of the cover, as a couple of Blogospheric Photoshop parodies of the Newsweek cover highlight, one of the problems that the legacy media faces, as it continues to push liberal narrative journalism over anything even approaching objective reporting is that it’s entirely predictable. Republicans are inevitably the bad guys; Democrats are invariably smart and cool (and Newsweek really made itself look even sillier than usual last month trying to defend Joe Biden), and since the reader knows exactly what to expect, there’s no real reason to buy the magazine. Or as Andrew Ferguson wrote earlier this year:
While flipping the pages of the new Newsweek, it began to occur to everybody that, hey, this is a pretty stupid idea for a magazine. Are there really 1.5 million magazine readers–the number of subscribers Jon has promised advertisers–who want a liberal opinion magazine written by liberals who don’t want to admit they’re liberals? Last week everybody looked at one another and pondered a world without Newsweek.
This sort of approach is fine, and understandable, for political magazines such as the New Republic, National Review, and Ferguson’s own Weekly Standard, where the reader expects to find partisan worldviews that match his own, but when applied to what once thought of as news, commits a cardinal sin of journalism:
It’s boring.
This post by Clay Waters of Newsbusters dovetails perfectly with my Silicon Graffiti video today:
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.
Since when has the Times had a problem with show trials?
The attacks on the media perfectly encapsulate the cynical brilliance of the Nixon administration. Scripted by Pat Buchanan and Bill Safire, and vetted by President Richard Nixon, Agnew’s speeches (there were several) began in Des Moines, Iowa, on Nov. 13, 1969. They proved remarkably successful. Agnew appeared on the cover of Time and Life magazines, special features on his criticism aired on all three national broadcast networks, and invitations to speak to civic and community organizations flooded his office.
The speeches were notable for both their content and style. No successful national politician had so forthrightly attacked The New York Times or CBS News. Stylistically, the speeches were filled with insults (barely) cloaked in peppery, alliterative phrases. But hidden beneath Agnew’s name-calling was a far more serious in-dictment of media consolidation. This part of the speech — now largely forgotten — changed the American media landscape forever.
In the newsrooms and executive offices of American media organizations the attack led to a great deal of internal self-examination. At CBS News, Charles Kuralt already had been assigned (“On the Road”) to report back on rarely reported aspects of America, and shortly after Agnew’s speeches NBC News sent two reporters out to do the same thing. A survey of local television stations revealed that 115 of 123 stations had started “a serious search” for more “good news items” after Agnew’s attack. Local news turned more toward soft news and light features, beginning a move away from critical reporting that has continued to this day.
The New York Times responded by implementing the OpEd page after years of internal debate. John B. Oakes, the editorial page editor of the Times who conceived the idea of the OpEd page (basing it upon a commentary page in the old New York World called the Page Op), had tried to launch the innovation for more than a decade. The publisher agreed only after the White House’s criticism could no longer be ignored. Oakes later described Agnew as typical of the oppositional voices he wanted represented in the Times. The first edition of the OpEd page featured both a critical assessment of Agnew’s speeches and an unflattering caricature of the vice president.
Both Agnew and Oakes professed a belief in the value of a diverse marketplace of ideas, but they held divergent philosophical views on the media’s social role. Oakes believed the media should lead and teach, invigorating the public sphere with fresh perspectives and ideas. For Agnew, the media’s responsibility was to be re-sponsive to the masses. This essential question — whether the news media should lead public opinion or reflect it — remains unresolved four decades later. But with the rise of the blogosphere, Fox News, the decline of journalistic authority and the fragmentation of audiences, Agnew’s vision clearly holds the upper hand.
Were Agnew alive today, he would undoubtedly be pleased by his contribution to the current media environment. Never have the American media been bombarded by such constant criticism — from both the right and the left. The motivations, assumptions and biases of professional journalists are closely and constantly examined, and the authority of their work has correspondingly eroded.
Two observations: first, didn’t Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center say much the same thing a decade ago? And second, a generation whose elites spent the last 40 years alternately shouting “Question Authority”, “Dissent Is Patriotic”, and teaching postmodernism, multiculturalism, and the importance of diversity in all things, shouldn’t be too surprised when the rest of the American people take them up on those ideas and begin to seek out media sources that reflect their own values.
Andrew Sullivan savors the secrets…of the Necronomicon!
This is only the second time in its nearly ten-year history that the Dish has gone silent. The reason now is the same as the reason then. When dealing with a delusional fantasist like Sarah Palin, it takes time to absorb and make sense of the various competing narratives that she tells about her life. There are so many fabrications and delusions in the book, mixed in with facts, that just making sense of it – and comparing it with objective reality as we know it, and the subjective reality she has previously provided – is a bewildering task. She is a deeply disturbed person which makes this work of fiction and fact all the more challenging to read.
The key phrase there being “objective reality as we know it”; always a moving target with Andrew.
(Via Dan Riehl, who sees a Kurtzian metaphor in all this; for more Lovecraftian fun, just click here.)
Update: Jim Treacher writes, “As we all pray for Andrew Sullivan’s safe return, a look back: Palin Dodges Tough Questions About Existence of ‘Alaska.’”
The weekend before November’s elections, Frank Rich of the New York Times wrote a curious column titled, “The G.O.P. Stalinists Invade Upstate New York.”
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:
Click below to watch:
Huh — I must have missed him on the National Review Cruise last November. But as Allie Duzett of Accuracy In Media writes, America’s fourth-ranked cable news channel “is now claiming that Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, is a conservative”:
On November 10, 2009, CNN Special Investigations Correspondent Drew Griffin called Hasan “conservative,” and now that talking point is being spewed again on today’s front page online story. The story, about Hasan’s search for a wife, discusses how two imams told CNN “about [Hasan’s] conservatism.” The story also mentions Hasan’s “conservative” clothing choices.
However—what exactly about Hasan is conservative?
Fact: Islamofascism is not conservative, in any way. Hating America is not conservative—conservatives tend to love their country. Wanting to blow up America is not conservative—again, conservatives tend to love their country. Hating people for their religion (or lack thereof) is not conservative—conservatives are not the ones trying to remove other people’s religions from the public sphere.
What Hasan did was not conservative. Murdering men and women in the armed forces is not conservative—conservatives are traditionally the ones most supportive of our men and women in the armed forces. Murdering fetuses is absolutely not conservative—conservatives tend to oppose abortion, and Hasan murdered a pregnant woman and her unborn child. And of course, wearing traditional clothing—even Islamic clothing—does not make you a conservative. While I don’t believe the story meant to imply that Hasan’s clothing linked him to a conservative ideology, I believe the writer could have picked a better word for it. Hasan may have been religious, but religiosity never makes one conservative, even if that person is a traditionalist within the religion.
This is just another case of CNN’s reporters creating a link to conservatism where there really is none.
Meanwhile, as Kathy Shaidle notes, for a “conservative”, Hasan sure knew his leftwing psychobabble.
Update: Karol Sheinin of the Alaming News blog notes that Wolf Blitzer has also taken to calling Hasan “conservative”:
Wolf Blitzer just described Ft. Hood shooter as “Conservative Muslim Major”. Was he for low taxes? Smaller govt? Tell me more, Wolf.
And of course, CNN is the go-to source for expert opinion regarding conservatism in general. Just ask Anderson Cooper and Rick Sanchez.
Update: Meanwhile, over at MSNBC, it’s “Maddow at Most Orwellian: Murder of Abortion Doctor ‘Terrorism’ — But Not Ft. Hood Massacre by Jihadist.”
Or, two, two, two magazines in one! When Wolcott Gibbs coined his famous satire of the breathless tone of the early Time magazine writers of the 1930s (also parodied in the writing of the brilliant “News On The March!” faux-newsreel in Citizen Kane), he didn’t know the half of it.
On Saturday, I mentioned Time magazine’s “Why Main Street Hates Wall Street” cover. The actual article begins thusly:
Are you furious? If not, you should be. The giant financial institutions that make up Wall Street have been bailed out, thanks to trillions of dollars of our money, and are on track to hand out record-breaking multibillion-dollar bonuses while millions of regular folks are hurting. Even outside the gilded halls of Wall Street, there’s no shortage of good cheer: many economists say the Great Recession has ended, and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke keeps seeing “green shoots” in the economy.
But the only green shoots that many non–Wall Street types have seen lately are the weeds sprouting in the parking lots of abandoned malls. Unemployment is marching toward 10%, and house foreclosures are still rising. If you’re a day late with your credit-card payment or overdrawn by a few bucks on your ATM card, the bank (which your tax money helped bail out) is still sticking you with obscene fees and charges. Hence the question that so many of us are asking: Where’s my bailout?
But many Americans see a bright spot in our current craptacular economy, as Time explains elsewhere:
Happiness is a sappy word and a flimsy concept — more fleeting than contentment, several octaves lower than joy. But happiness is what pollsters test and economists track, however clumsily, so we’re stuck with it as the medium for measuring our mood. Not surprisingly, that mood has bounced around over the years, with the general sense of well-being hitting its lowest points in 1973, 1982, 1992 and 2001, all recession years. So why is it that at least some aspects of the Great Recession of 2009 appear to have made people feel better?
The Professor writes, “Time asks why Americans are so cheery during a recession. Well, all that positive press spin probably helps. I mean, it’s almost worth having a Democrat in the White House just to be spared all the lugubrious coverage we’d be getting with a Republican. . . .”
And for the reverse of that spin, it’s worth flashing back to the AP article from last year that had the classic headline, “Everything seemingly is spinning out of control”:
Is everything spinning out of control? Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and against terrorism.
Horatio Alger, twist in your grave.
The can-do, bootstrap approach embedded in the American psyche is under assault. Eroding it is a dour powerlessness that is chipping away at the country’s sturdy conviction that destiny can be commanded with sheer courage and perseverance.
Why, it’s like the difference in tone between the reporting on one progressive president and another in the early days of the Depression. Or how the difference in how the media covered two moderate southern governors turned Third Way presidents who both promoted regime change in Iraq.
It’s amazing what the letter after a president’s name can do to impact The Narrative — not to mention how it twists journalists into knots who have to bend it to their wishes.
Jonah Goldberg catches an “amazing” moment from Anita Dunn, the Mao-loving lame duck Obama White House communications director:
The other day I listened to some of an interview with Anita Dunn. I loved this bit of Q&A from the audience:
QUESTION: Hi. Yes, I’m Mark Kaiser, and I work for the Freedom Forum here. I just had a question about – back to the FOX issue. I think it’s pretty safe to say that there’s, you know, opinions, strong opinions on both sides at the networks.
My specific question would be if it was helpful to the overall discussion to say that FOX was not a legitimate news organization. Granted, they’re in opposition to a lot of Obama’s policies, and there’s a lot to be said about that, but, I mean, was it helpful to identify them so strongly?
DUNN: You know, it’s - I recommend everybody, if you get a chance to go on YouTube, Jon Stewart actually did one of the most amazing pieces of journalism last week or a couple of weeks ago in which he actually looked at the way FOX, on their opinion shows, raises some, you know, some – some issue that then gets reported on by their news division as, quote, “a controversy,” and then they go find someone to comment.
It wasn’t the only time she plugged the Daily Show’s journalistic genius. I don’t object to criticism of Fox from the left any more than I object to criticism of MSNBC from the right (even if I might disagree on the substance of the criticism). But when the communications director wants to justify an effort to delegitimize a major news organization simply because it is critical of the president, she might want to avoid holding up a comedy show as an exemplar of legitimate journalism.
At least Ron Ziegler knew that…even if Ron Nesson didn’t.
Headline via Paul McCartney and John Lennon, the flaming statue of Obama on cover of Time magazine by way of the an enthusiastic Chinese sculptor. I’m sure the mullahs in Iran are ordering copies of this satue, and plenty of lighter fluid for their offices:
The Chinese have learned English from his speeches and celebrated the way he rolls up his sleeves . [Only Nixon could to China, only Obama could go to Van Heusen--Ed] Now President Barack Obama is finally coming, and he’s being greeted with “Oba Mao” T-shirts and a statue of him that bursts into flames.
Oba Mao?! I’m sure Obama will pick a few of those for Anita Dunn and Ron Bloom. More from the AP:
Sunday’s arrival of a U.S. president admired for his charisma is already a source of profit and brief fame for some Chinese.
Strangest is the burning Obama, tucked away in a Beijing warehouse. Artist Liu Bolin hopes Obama can take time from his visit to drop by.
“He’s so hot right now, so I wanted to translate that through my work,” said Liu, who was inspired by the idea of the first black U.S. president.
The bronze Obama bust is modeled on Time magazine’s “Man of the Year” cover and is speckled with holes for gas that ignites every couple of minutes.
It’s a positive work, Liu said.
“Yes, setting something on fire can have negative connotations, but this piece represents energy and life that Obama has given to the world,” said the 38-year-old, who made a similar piece for former revolutionary leader Mao Zedong.
“We’re eager to see what he can do for China and U.S. relations.”
(H/T: Moe Lane.)
Related: More from Mo on those Oba-Mao duds.
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….
….Then apostates must be demonized. Keep flucking that chicken, legacy media.
The new show is online:
In today’s edition of Best of the Web, James Taranto juxtaposes these two amusing anecdotes:
The author of “Primary Colors” is growing increasingly unhinged, the Washington Post reports:
A debate between Time’s Joe Klein and New Republic’s Jamie Kirchick spilled off the dais Tuesday into a hallway confrontation where Klein called the younger pundit a “dishonest [expletive]” and “[expletiving] propagandist.”
Klein told us Wednesday that he’s not sure he uttered the “propagandist” bit — reported by a few witnesses–but stands by the “dishonest” part.
“Absolutely. He’s a [expletive],” said Klein, 62. “He’s 25 years old, and he’s one of those people who has opinions but no facts or experience.” . . .
Said Klein: “When I was Kirchick’s age, I was every bit as unnuanced about the war in Vietnam as he is now about this war. He says I patronized him. Guilty as charged!”
For crying out loud, Joe, your “war” with a 25-year-old is hardly the equivalent of Vietnam. The New York Post, meanwhile, reports on a scuffle in uptown Manhattan:
A prominent Columbia architecture professor punched a female university employee in the face at a Harlem bar during a heated argument about race relations, cops said yesterday.
Police busted Lionel McIntyre, 59, for assault yesterday after his bruised victim, Camille Davis, filed charges. . . .
The professor, who is black, had been engaged in a fiery discussion about “white privilege” with Davis, who is white, and another male regular, who is also white, Friday night at 10:30 when fists started flying, patrons said.
In a hilarious example of political correctness, the New York Times reports on the McIntyre-Davis bout omits McIntyre’s race, although it does say he “liked to engage fellow patrons on the subject of race.”
We hear rumors, though, that Klein and McIntyre have been cast in a forthcoming sequel to “Grumpy Old Men.”
At the New Ledger, Benjamin Kerstein asks an increasingly reasonable sounding question regarding the current state of Joe’s acumen.
John Fund writes, “Sarah Palin outsmarts the Beltway”:
Inhabitants of the self-obsessed Beltway political world already have a beef with Sarah Palin’s new memoir, “Going Rogue.”
Political types in Washington make a show of turning up their noses at actually buying and reading such books, but familiar faces can regularly be spotted in store aisles anyway scanning for their names in the index. Sarah Palin’s book won’t have an index, denying Beltway habitués the instant gratification of knowing whether they are included. Instead, political and media types who want to know if they figure in accounts of her conflicts with the McCain campaign or with major news media personalities such as Katie Couric will actually have to buy the book and at least skim it.
The inside joke on Washington D.C.’s preening egos of publishing a political book without an index was pioneered a dozen years ago by John Brady, author of “Bad Boy: The Life and Politics of Lee Atwater,” a biography of the controversial master of negative campaigning who advised the first President Bush’s 1988 election bid.
Mr. Brady’s intent was to boost sales. For scholars and other serious readers he offered a copy of the index to anyone who sent him a stamped, self-addressed envelope. His ploy worked exactly as intended. The book certainly wasn’t a major best-seller, but a Washington bookstore manager told me at the time that several people felt obliged actually to buy the Atwater biography after learning it lacked the shortcut of an index.
She’s also caused a famously misogynist subsidiary of General Electric to lose it once again.
Jennifer Rubin links to a Washington Post item on the curious lettering found on Major Nidal Hasan’s business cards. You can see one in detail in this photo from yesterday’s Dallas Morning News photo spread on the contents of Hasan’s apartment:
Click photo to enlarge; Jennifer writes:
The Washington Post reports that Major Nadal Hasan’s apartment contained some business cards imprinted as follows:
Behavioral Health — Mental Health — Life Skills
Nidal Hasan, MD, MPH
SoA(SWT)
Psychiatrist
The Post explains: “SoA refers to ’soldier of Allah’ or ’slave of Allah,’ and ‘SWT’ to an Arabic phrase meaning ‘glory to him, the exalted.’” Sometimes there is simply no way to explain away reality.
Indeed; related thoughts on Hasan’s business card from Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs, who has another photo of one of the cards.
Oh, and by the way, the Dallas Morning News also photographed a now-empty blister pack they also found in Hasan’s apartment that previously contained a LaserMax gun-sight:
Montel is ready to party like it’s 1942! “Montel Williams Suggests Ft. Hood Shooting Could Cause Massive Internment, Like Japanese Under FDR.”
Uh-huh. Still though, Time magazine warned us that President Obama was the second coming of FDR…
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!
