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.
Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard writes of his experience shooting an appparently abortive Bloggingheads.tv segment with Malou Innocent of the Cato Institute, in which Goldfarb compared the War in Afghanistan in the naughts, with the War in the Pacific of the 1940s — in other words, comparing the GWOT with WWII:
As soon as I started comparing the war in the Pacific with the war in Afghanistan, Innocent jumped all over me. “You’re not comparing Imperial Japan to al Qaeda?” she asked. “No, of course not,” I assured her. Respectable people can’t compare the wars America is fighting now with the Great and Good War America fought against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
But, you know what? On second thought, Imperial Japan and al Qaeda have a lot in common — and so do the Second World War and the war in Afghanistan. The Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor, killing more Americans than any attack on U.S. soil until al Qaeda launched its own sneak attack on 9/11. The Japanese and al Qaeda also share the same fanatical devotion to their “cause.” The Japanese had kamikazes and al Qaeda has kamikazes — with hundreds of passengers on board. Our enemies in both wars shared a suicidal commitment to an impossible delusion of world domination. The war in the Pacific was a bloodbath as a result. Women and children threw themselves off of cliffs on Saipan rather than surrender to U.S. Marines. Only 1,000 Japanese surrendered on Iwo, the other 22,000 died fighting or were buried or burned alive in the island’s caves. On Okinawa the Japanese sacrificed 100,000 men in the service of a lost cause.
The American people braced for the invasion of Japan, but Truman wasn’t prepared to see a million Americans killed or wounded when there was a chance to end the war quickly with the Bomb. Truman would use nuclear weapons against civilian populations, so committed was his government to total victory and so costly would that victory have been if it was pursued by conventional means.
In Afghanistan today, against a fanatical enemy who attacked the United States and murdered 3,000 civilians, the president and his party seem to be looking for a way out. No more pay any price, bear any burden. They would have us surrender rather than spend another $50 billion to provide McChrystal with the troops he needs. They would have us leave Kandahar and Kabul to the Taliban and their al Qaeda allies rather than lose hundreds, maybe thousands, more American soldiers in the mountains of Afghanistan.
Maybe the great mistake in Afghanistan was to treat it like it was a different kind of war than World War II. If there was a chance to get bin Laden in the caves of Tora Bora, we should have sent in the Marines with flame-throwers just like we did on Iwo. Now the President of the United States considers abandoning the fight against an enemy that attacked America and is determined to attack America again. We could leave and hope for the best, but Truman could have done the same in June of 1945. ‘We’ll contain them from Okinawa, Iwo Jima and the Philippines, we’ll use airpower to disrupt their operations, we’ll send the boys home and maintain a flexible, over-the-horizon strike force,’ Truman might have said — and that’s essentially what the Democrats are proposing, and Obama is now considering.
One big difference between the GWOT and WWII of course, was how the left responded. At the start of WWII, the American left, following Stalin’s orders, were effectively in agreement with the isolationist right that America should stay out of the war, though needless to say, for different reasons. It was only Hitler invading Russia that caused the American left — again, based on Stalin’s orders — to support the war, causing some amusing pivots along the way, perhaps most visibly by screenwriter/novelist Dalton Trumbo and proto-folkie Pete Seeger.
In contrast, during the 1990s, in terms of Afghanistan, American feminists appeared to be united that something should be done about the perilous conditions of women living under the Taliban. And the American left and right were in agreement that in Iraq, Saddam Hussein should be isolated from the world stage and removed from if it all possible — and indeed, Al Gore, Bill Clinton and the rest of their administration sounded remarkably hawkish during that period:
Of course, once somebody actually did do something about Saddam and the Taliban, support from the left began to evaporate, in contradistinction to their pivot in the 1940s:
“I’ll tell you my impression. We really in this last election, when I say we…the Democrats, I think pushed it as far as we can to the end of the fleet, didn’t say it, but we implied it. That if we won the Congressional elections, we could stop the war. Now anybody was a good student of Government would know that wasn’t true. But you know, the temptation to want to win back the Congress, we sort of stretched the facts…and people ate it up.”
* * *
The Democrats backed themselves into defending the idea of Afghanistan being The Good War because they felt they needed to prove their macho bonafides they called for withdrawal from Iraq. Nobody asked too many questions sat the time, including me. But none of us should forget that it was a political strategy, not a serious foreign policy.
There have been many campaign promises “adjusted” since the election. There is no reason that the administration should feel any more bound to what they said about this than all the other committments [sic] it has blithely turned aside in the interest of “pragmatism.”
* * *
“I assumed that because we elected Obama to end the war in Iraq that it went without saying that the war in Afghanistan would be ended as well. Apparently not so.”
Well, to be fair, the jury’s still out on the second half of that last equation.
“Executives at Fox News like to call [Fox & Friends] ‘the anti-Today show.’ Though the morning banter is always polite between NBC’s Katie Couric and Matt Lauer, on Today they keep things light and fun but assiduously avoid revealing their biases.
Seeing as they each impact key pillars of what today passes for liberalism, there seems to be more than a few connections between the recent ACORN stings by Giles, O’Keefe and Breitbart, and the recent hacking of the emails of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit, or “Global WarmingGate”, as Charlie Martin dubs it elsewhere at Pajamas. Not the least is that they each sent the legacy media into full gatekeeper mode, hoping to prevent exciting, important news of current events from ever reaching their readers. Or perhaps, like the scandal last year involving John Edwards, sitting on the stories for so long, while making claims that they have to endlessly research them to verify their authenticity — Keep rockin’! — that when the legacy media decides to go “public” with news that everyone already knows, they can dramatically dilute the ultimate impact of these stories.
In September, we noted the L.A. Times’ hypocrisy when they wrote, “O’Keefe’s hidden-camera methods are distasteful, and the extent to which his videos were edited is unknown” — as opposed to the hidden camera videos run almost every week by their fellow liberal brethren on 60 Minutes since the show debuted on CBS over 40 years ago.
And as a nice sequel of sorts to our previous post on leftwing cognitive dissonance, Orrin Judd spots this staggering moment of hypocrisy from the New York Times’ Andrew C. Revkin of their “Dot Earth” blog on Friday:
The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.
And they don’t contain any obvious state military secrets as well, unlike say the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War or more recently, the secrets of War on Terror, or any of a number of other leaked documents the Times has cheerfully rushed to print.
Back in 2006, when his paper disclosed the previously confidential details of the SWIFT program, which was designed to trace terrorists’ financial assets, New York Times executive editor Bill Keller said on CBS’s Face the Nation, “one man’s breach of security is another man’s public relations.” Of course, much like the rest of the media circling the wagons with ACORN, it’s not at all surprising that the Times circles the wagons when it’s necessary to save the public face of their fellow liberals.
Incidentally, Tom Maguire explains the perfect way to square the circle:
If Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe are done tormenting ACORN maybe they can figure out how to pose as underaged climate researchers…
Update: At the Weekly Standard, Michael Goldfarb adds, “As a journalist, there is no greater glory than publishing materials that were not meant to be published”:
If I could, I would only publish emails and documents that were never meant to see the light of day — though, unlike the New York Times, I draw the line at jeopardizing the lives of American troops rather than jeopardizing the contrived “consensus” on global warming.
And of course, the Times has those priorities exactly reversed. But then, for the Gray Lady, small government Republicans are “Stalinists”, but actual totalitarian governments are worthy of emulation and respect.
Update: On Twitter, “Justkarl” asks, “You don’t suppose the real reason Revkin won’t publish the CRU e-mails is that he’s implicated in them?”, adding, “Revkin CRU e-mail. Likely here too.”
Related: For those who would like to “Wear The Decline”, T-shirts are now available in the lobby!
Update (11/23/09): And speaking of bringing things full circle, the commenters below note that the Times had few ethical concerns when they linked to the hacked emails of Sarah Palin last fall during the presidential election.
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.
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 movingtarget with Andrew.
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….
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?
As Rand Simberg writes, Barack Obama, while on the campaign trail last year, “persuaded many small business people to pull in their horns and make plans to keep a low profile (including laying people off) in order to avoid the wealth confiscation of the populist, socialist, economic storm they saw coming with his election.” And once in office, he’s very much kept up that tone. What could he have done instead?
Though he might have caused trouble with his own party, Obama could have certainly forged a coalition of Republicans and moderate Democrats were he really the post-partisan, reach-across-the-aisle lightworker that we were promised in the campaign — a promise belied by his actual record in the Senate. It’s called triangulation, and Bill Clinton learned post-1994 that one could not only succeed politically with it, but that it could deliver good results for the country as well (at least until the bubble popped in 2000).
The only problem with it is that Barack Obama is incapable of doing anything so smart, either as a campaigner or a president. Unlike Bill Clinton, Obama is a committed ideologue — a man raised by Marxists and mentored as a youth by a communist, who sought out similar types in college by his own admission in the autobiography he may or may not have actually written himself. He’s a man who ran on the ticket of an avowedly socialist party in the 1990s. He’s a man who sat in the pew of a racist, anti-Semitic, America-hating demagogue for two decades with no objection, until he discovered that it was becoming inconvenient to his political goals. He’s a man who has willfully marinated his entire life in an ugly stew of socialism, racialism, victimology, class warfare, and other “progressive” tropes fashionable in academia and elite America but abhorrent to many of the rest of us.
So it should be no surprise that Obama has no sensible solutions for stimulating the economy, and will brook none. He is no more capable of stimulating an economy than was Mao Tse-tung, the hero of one of his close advisers. And for exactly the same reasons.
A commenter at my blog a few months ago made an interesting point. Clearly the people currently holding the reins of power believe that their policies comport the most with their political goals. But it’s not at all clear that growing the economy — or at least the productive, non-governmental part of it — is one of those goals.
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.”
Iowahawk has a superb mock headline roundup of how the legacy media is (depending upon your point of view) either covering Nidal Hasan, or would prefer to be covering him.
Update: Whoops — I missed this line in Iowahwk’s spot-on parody of Time magazine: “Hasan was a psychiatrist whom the Army desperately needed to help tend to the mental wounds of two wars.”
In the mid-1970s, liberals were outraged over Tom Wolfe’s book, The Painted Wordfor deflating the pretensions of one of the left’s then-most sacred institutions: modern art. Traditional painting and sculpture were based on two millenia of aesthetic assumptions, meaning that anyone could instantly understand the art they were looking at. Modern art eventually jettisoned traditional aesthetics to turn itself into a sort of insular game where the theory behind the art was far more important than the actual work of art itself. (Hence the title of Wolfe’s book.)
And there, at last, it was! No more realism, no more representational objects, no more lines, colors forms, and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes, no more evocations, no more frames, walls, galleries, museums, no more gnawing at the tortured face of the god Flatness, no more audience required, just a “receiver” that may or may not be there at all, no more ego projected, just “the artist”, in the third person, who may be anyone or no one at all, not even existence, for that got lost in the subjunctive mode–and in the moment of absolutely dispassionate abdication, of insouciant withering away, Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher until, with one last erg of freedom, one last dendritic synapse, it disappeared up its own fundamental aperature…and came out the other side as Art Theory!…Art Theory pure and simple, words on a page, literature undefiled by vision, flat, flatter, Flattest, a vision invisible, even ineffable, as ineffable as the Angels and the Universal Souls.
“(Untitled)” isn’t a conservative film in any narrowly doctrinaire sense of the word. It isn’t a Randian broadside against “the looters” trying to implement socialized medicine. It isn’t a rousing war epic in the vein of “300″ or “The Longest Day.” It isn’t a terrible parody film that takes cheap shots against easy targets such as Michael Moore.
Instead, “(Untitled)” goes after postmodernism — specifically, postmodern art.
Brothers Adrian and Josh Jacobs (Adam Goldberg and Eion Bailey, respectively) are artists of different temperaments. Adrian’s a sound artist whose musical arrangements include bucket-kicking and vinyl-squeaking; Josh is more successful, a painter whose compositions are less challenging than his brother’s cacophonous noise but far more popular.
Josh’s popularity with corporate types doesn’t win him what he desires, however: a showing in the avant-garde art gallery owned by Madeleine Gray (Marley Shelton). Madeleine has been content to sell his art — it keeps her afloat financially, in fact — but she refuses to show his work because it will diminish her credibility with the artiste set.
Instead, she shows art that can only be described as hideous. One exhibited artist is Ray Barko (Vinnie Jones), whose work resembles a taxidermist’s office by way of Derrida: Animals are stuffed and put into odd positions and splashed with makeup as a “comment” on society.
Another show consists of little more than items from a home placed onto a wall. A thumb tack (”Pushpin Stuck Into Wall”), for example, or a flickering lightbulb. In the world of New York’s hipster pomo set, this is what passes for art.
As Josh becomes more and more frustrated by Madeleine’s sensibilities, he finally blows his stack, yelling out, “When did beauty become so… ugly?”
“(Untitled)” is by no means a defense of banality in art, and Josh’s art is nothing if not banal — his painted canvases of soothing colors dotted with the occasional sphere line the hallways of corporate meeting rooms and hospitals. Instead, “(Untitled)” searches for the midpoint between banality and absurdity, doing so in a way that is likely to please lovers of both modern and classical art.
Again, this isn’t a fire-breathing conservative tract. It’s far more subtle than that. But it is a celebration of art and, in large part, a rejection of the turn the artistic avant-garde has taken over the last few decades.
It’s a relatively brave rejection at that: Those who argue that Hollywood is uniformly too timid to attack its own sacred cows would do well to recognize it. We shall see if they do.
Well, count me in — Bunch certainly makes it sound like a picture well worth checking out, unlike most of the post-1960s art at MOMA.
Mark Steyn coined the above headline in response to this entirely predictable response from the BBC:
Shooting Raises Fears For Muslims In US Army
As Mark writes:
Really? Right now the body count stands at:
Non-Muslims 13
Muslims 0
I was reading from some of this kind of coverage on the Rush Limbaugh show today. Even if you are concerned that it would be terribly unfair if all Muslims were to be tarred by Major Hasan’s brush, it is, to put it at its mildest, the grossest bad taste to default every single time within minutes to the position that what’s of most interest about an actual atrocity with real victims is that it may provoke an entirely hypothetical atrocity with entirely hypothetical victims. I refer you yet again to this note-perfect parody:
British Muslims Fear Repercussions Over Tomorrow’s Train Bombing
This kind of media coverage is really a form of mental illness far more advanced than whatever Major Hasan’s lawyers eventually enter in mitigation, and apparently pandemic, at least among the Western media.
Meanwhile, here’s a choice quote from the Jawa Report; click over to hear the audio:
Thanks to DB in the comment section who directs us to this post, which features a BBC interview by Gavin Lee with a member of the Killeen, Texas mosque outside Ft Hood, the Islamic Community Center of Greater Killeen, where Malik Nidal Hasan was currently attending.
In the interview (the whole interview can be heard here), mosque member “Duane” not only refuses to condemn Hasan, but justifies their murder because “they were troops who were going to Afghanistan and Iraq to kill Muslims”.
Here’s the relevant portion of the interview:
Duane : I’m not going to condemn him for what he did. I don’t know why he did it. I will not, absolutely not, condemn him for what he had done though. If he had done it for selfish reasons I still will not condemn him. He’s my brother in the end. I will never condemn him.
Gavin Lee : There might be a lot of people shocked to hear you say that.
Duane: Well, that’s the way it is. I don’t speak for the community here but me personally I will not condemn him.
Gavin Lee : What are your thoughts towards those that were victims in this?
Duane : They were, in the end, they were troops who were going to Afghanistan and Iraq to kill Muslims. I honestly have no pity for them. It’s just like the majority of the people that will hear this, after five or six minutes they’ll be shocked, after that they’ll forget about them and go on their day.
This man was being entrusted with the mental health of soldiers, and no one could be bothered to take the time to find out if he was mentally stable himself? After a poor review, remarks that make you wonder which side this guy was on, and possible writings on a web posting that are troubling, he was not investigated?
Was it political correctness and concern for his Muslim heritage that kept officials from looking further into his mental health? Was the army so desperate for a psychiatrist (there is always a shortage) they didn’t dare do anything?
The public deserves an explanation.
In wondering how Hasan functioned in the Army for so long, I can’t help but flashback to an earlier Steyn piece from 2005, referring back to, as he dubbed it, “the defining encounter of the age”:
WITH hindsight, the defining encounter of the age was not between Mohammed Atta’s jet and the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, but that between Mohammed Atta and Johnelle Bryant a year earlier. Bryant is an official with the US Department of Agriculture in Florida, and the late Atta had gone to see her about getting a $US650,000 government loan to convert a plane into the world’s largest crop-duster. A novel idea.
The meeting got off to a rocky start when Atta refused to deal with Bryant because she was but a woman. But, after this unpleasantness had been smoothed out, things went swimmingly. When it was explained to him that, alas, he wouldn’t get the 650 grand in cash that day, Atta threatened to cut Bryant’s throat. He then pointed to a picture behind her desk showing an aerial view of downtown Washington – the White House, the Pentagon et al – and asked: “How would America like it if another country destroyed that city and some of the monuments in it?”
Fortunately, Bryant’s been on the training course and knows an opportunity for multicultural outreach when she sees one. “I felt that he was trying to make the cultural leap from the country that he came from,” she recalled. “I was attempting, in every manner I could, to help him make his relocation into our country as easy for him as I could.”
So a few weeks later, when fellow 9/11 terrorist Marwan al-Shehhi arrived to request another half-million dollar farm subsidy and Atta showed up cunningly disguised with a pair of glasses and claiming to be another person entirely – to whit, al-Shehhi’s accountant – Bryant sportingly pretended not to recognise him and went along with the wheeze. The fake specs, like the threat to slit her throat and blow up the Pentagon, were just another example of the multicultural diversity that so enriches our society.
For four years, much of the western world behaved like Bryant. Bomb us, and we agonise over the “root causes” (that is, what we did wrong). Decapitate us, and our politicians rush to the nearest mosque to declare that “Islam is a religion of peace”. Issue bloodcurdling calls at Friday prayers to kill all the Jews and infidels, and we fret that it may cause a backlash against Muslims. Behead sodomites and mutilate female genitalia, and gay groups and feminist groups can’t wait to march alongside you denouncing Bush, Blair and Howard. Murder a schoolful of children, and our scholars explain that to the “vast majority” of Muslims “jihad” is a harmless concept meaning “decaf latte with skimmed milk and cinnamon sprinkles”.
Thursday’s attack at Fort Hood is an enormous reminder of the consequences of reverting back to the mindset of September 10th, no matter how tempting the idea of collective retrograde amnesia might be.
Update: And of course:
“President Obama says ‘we cannot fully know’ what led Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan to kill 13 people and wound 38 others at Fort Hood, Texas Thursday.” Guess it’s not a teachable moment, then.
As a reminder, political correctness is derived from the more intellectually respectable doctrine of cultural relativism (it’s sort of CR’s public “happy face”). In essence, cultural relativism holds that an individual’s beliefs and activities should only be understood in terms of his or her own culture. It’s the ultimate version of “who are we to the judge?” If Ayatollah Khomeini wishes to oppress all the women and homosexuals in Iran, it’s their way. If Mao seeks to knock off seventy million of his countrymen, so be it. Let the Chinese decide. We shouldn’t impose our values.
On our increasingly tiny globe, this theory – when spelled out – is nothing short of preposterous. It fairly invites a return to the mass murdering ideologies of the Twentieth Century – Nazism, communism, etc – and opens the door wide for Islamism.
Even so, its “happy face” partner political correctness continues to permeate our culture and our media. And, alas, as we are now painfully aware, it has infected our military – badly. How else to explain that Nidal Hassan was passed through the Army system for years despite making numerous public pronouncements that sounded as if they were ripped from the pages of an al Qaeda training manual?
This sad infection of our military is the most disturbing and self-destructive achievement of political correctness yet. Still, cable television spends hours trying to probe the “motivations” of Hasan, as if a Muslim bumper sticker torn from his car could explain his actions or even (oh, hope) exonerate him. That way we would not have to deal with the ideology behind him and, more importantly, not have to confront our own pathology.
But that pathology of political correctness has now been laid bare before us. More than the two handguns, it was the murder weapon in that room at Fort Hood. Those thirteen innocent people are indeed PC deaths because it was PC that allowed Hasan to be there. The question is, as it is with all emotionally loaded learning, what will we do with this new information?
To begin with, we must explore what attracted us to political correctness in the first place. Several explanations suggest themselves: political expediency, increased power in certain quarters, the desire to be left alone, the desire to be loved, even psychosexual masochism. There are more, I am sure. But they must be ventilated. Nothing can bring back the thirteen who were killed. But the most fitting memorial to them would be that their murders would signal the death knell of political correctness.
Indeed. But if 9/11 couldn’t do it, this disgusting but comparatively much smaller incident sadly won’t, either.
Update: Don Surber adds up his daily Good/Evil scorecard, including this item:
President Obama in his weekly address continued to deny that Army Major Nidal Hasan attacked and killed 12 fellow soldiers and civilians because Hasan is a jihadist. Obama: “They are Americans of every race, faith, and station. They are Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus and nonbelievers. They are descendants of immigrants and immigrants themselves. They reflect the diversity that makes this America. But what they share is a patriotism like no other. What they share is a commitment to country that has been tested and proved worthy. What they share is the same unflinching courage, unblinking compassion, and uncommon camaraderie that the soldiers and civilians of Ft. Hood showed America and showed the world.”
That is true. I totally agree with that. More Muslims have taken a bullet for our country than have fired them.
But a few people in every religion are zealots. Rather than acknowledge the obvious, the president went all PC: “We cannot fully know what leads a man to do such a thing.”
Suffering a president in denial, alas, is…
EVIL.
Well, it’s the Diet Coke of evil. Or perhaps the Billy Beer of evil, given Obama’s pitch-perfect resemblance to Billy’s more famous, if equally feckless brother.
James Taranto has a great capsule summary of, to paraphrase Budd Schulberg, What Makes Nancy Run:
The voters be damned: That seems to be Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s attitude in the wake of big Democratic losses on Tuesday. “House Democratic leaders, undeterred by delays in the Senate or this week’s Republican electoral triumphs, plan to call a vote Saturday on the most sweeping overhaul of U.S. health-care policy in four decades,” Bloomberg reports:
The House will move on the $1.05 trillion legislation that would cover 36 million uninsured people and create a government plan to compete with private insurers even after the election of Republican governors in New Jersey and Virginia. President Barack Obama will go to Capitol Hill tomorrow to meet with House Democrats, as they seek the 218 votes they need to pass the bill, a Democratic leadership aide said.
Politico reports that “leaders expect a close vote, with a one-or two-vote margin, and no Rs.” They plan to pass this monstrosity without bipartisan support and with the bare minimum of support from their own party. “Pelosi has reportedly told fellow Democrats that she’s prepared to lose seats in 2010 if that’s what it takes to pass ObamaCare,” The Wall Street Journal reports. Is she mad?
No, not really. Or we should say only ideologically, in that she loves the monstrous idea of socialized medicine. Given that, though, her actions make perfect sense in terms of practical politics. After all, this is likely to be the high-water mark for liberal Democrats. They’re likely to lose House seats next year anyway, and there’s no guarantee President Obama will be re-elected. At 69, Pelosi stands a good chance of facing a death panel before she leads a majority of this size again.
Besides, her seat is in no jeopardy. She comes from a safe ultraliberal district. The same is true of the Democratic committee chairmen, who had to be able to win re-election even in lean years like 1994. According to Wikipedia, no member of the left-wing Congressional Progressive Caucus has lost re-election in a general election (Rep. Cynthia McKinney of Georgia lost a primary to another CPC member).
So Pelosi will probably still be speaker a year from now, even if her caucus is diminished. In the worst-case scenario, she’ll be minority leader, with hopes of returning to the speakership on the strength of President Obama’s re-election coattails. This is a small price to pay for the privilege of seizing control of Americans’ health care.
When the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan dumped some of his closest cabinet colleagues to extricate himself from a political crisis, the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe responded: “Greater love hath no man than to lay down his friends for his life.”
His, her — in Pelosi’s home district of San Francisco, they’re pretty flexible about that stuff.
Meanwhile, on the floor of Congress today, Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit has video of a haggard looking Charlie Rangel (D-NY) saying “he won’t answer Rep. John Boehner’s question because he doesn’t want to violate House Ethics laws.”
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]
for deflating the pretensions of one of the left’s then-most sacred institutions: modern art. Traditional painting and sculpture were based on two millenia of aesthetic assumptions, meaning that anyone could instantly understand the art they were looking at. Modern art eventually jettisoned traditional aesthetics to turn itself into a sort of insular game where the theory behind the art was far more important than the actual work of art itself. (Hence the title of Wolfe’s book.)
