To the folks at MSNBC, slutty's just another big word

Powerlineblog.com has an excellent video up tonight of a trainwreck of an interview at MSNBC.  Even if you don’t have time to watch the interview the description of MSNBC is priceless:

MSNBC occupies a curious niche in the media landscape. It is the first network that has ample financial resources but at the same time, production values on a par with the average home movie and intellectual standards below those of the typical ninth grader. It would be interesting to know who comprises their audience.

Maybe they're not moving to the center. Maybe they're moving to the right.

Yesterday Terry McAuliffe was, thankfully, annihilated in the Virginia Democratic gubernatorial primary.  With huge name recognition and a reputation as a bitter partisan liberal, he took only 26 percent of the vote in a three-way race.  The most conservative Dem in the race, Deeds, won with 50 percent.

What’s interesting to me is that the story gets covered as “Democrats in Virginia move to the center” and there’s the suggestion, even in the right-leaning Fox News, that Republicans ought to do the same.

Who decided that the possible “directions” in which a party can move are centerward and outward.  Wouldn’t it make more sense to say that voters in the Democratic primary were clearly moving to the right and that Republicans ought to pay attention and offer a strong, principled conservative voice?

With the left in control of all the levers of power in Washington, Americans are getting a clear, unvarnished view of the type of havoc wreaked when you expose the world’s most vibrant economy to management by Chris Dodd, Barney Frank and GM Board Chairman Barack “never ran a business before” Obama. There has not, in recent memory, been a more opportune time for principled conservatives to stand up and describe why reducing the intrusion of government in people’s lives leads inexorably to more prosperity for everyone.

People are already demonstrating that they want a choice, and that the change BO is bringing is not what they had in mind when they voted for him.  The right should give people that choice, not converge on mediocrity at the political center.  I think we saw in the 2008 race that if the only choices are a Republican liberal and a Democrat liberal, the Dem’s going to inspire more excitement.  The pendulum is swinging, as it always does.  Let’s not meet them in the middle.

Happy Birthday Totalitarian Nightmare!

Believe it or not it’s been 60 years since George Orwell predicted a totalitarin nightmare in which an ever-more stifling and far-reaching government would use the euphamistic lies of Newspeak to disguise their constant assault on freedom and individual liberty.

In totally unrelated news, the proposed legislation to rob workers of secret ballots, enabling intimidation by union thugs will be known as “The Employee Free Choice Act”.  The greatest orgy of debt and spending ever known will be termed “A New Era of Fiscal Reponsibility” (illustrated below by the Congressional Budget Office.”  And a pork-filled nightmare that heaps hundreds of billions on favored political cronies while driving the nation deeper into recession will be called “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act“.

We now return you to our live broadcast of “Big Brother”.

How not to get out of a "deep hole"

Hillary Clinton was on This Week with George Stephanapoulos today (transcript here).  She described why she decided to serve in Obama’s cabinet, even after she’d made clear her belief (now validated by the world) that Obama’s nowhere near ready to be President.  The thought process she described helped me understand why Team Obama is so effective at making every situation it touches turn far worse:

“I thought, you know, we are in just so many deep holes that everybody had better grab a shovel and start digging out,” Clinton said.

Tell me, dear readers . . . if you were stuck in a deep hole, would you be using a shovel to get out?  Or would, perhaps, a rope or a ladder be a better solution?

I'd like to speak directly, but I can't

Reluctantly, I’m watching Obama talk about the next GM bailout.  As usual, he can’t remember even the smallest segment of his speech.  It’s just back and forth, from the left teleprompter to the right teleprompter, like he’s watching a tennis match. Which made this phrase hysterical:

“I want to say a word directly to the people affected by this . . .”.

I want to, but I can’t.  Cause those people are at home in their living room and if I look at the camera I’ll have no idea at all what to say.  So instead I’ll say a word to the left of those people, then I’ll say a word to the right of those people, then I’ll go back to the left.  But if you average all my words together, I’ll be speaking directly to those people.

Capitalism, gangster-style

Have you followed the Chrysler bankruptcy issue at all?  In a nutshell, the White House has come up with a reorganization for Chrysler that gives the UAW and the federal government a far more favorable outcome than a number of bond holders.  The bond holders have the right to accept or reject the deal.  They felt that the pennies on the dollar being offered were far less than they’d likely get in a bankruptcy court managed reorganization, so they turned down the deal, performing their fiduciary duty to the private investors who are their clients.

In return, the White House threatened to use “the full force of the White House press corps to disparage and malign the companies who refused, and Obama himself has publicly repudiated them for not “agreeing to share the burden”.

Keep in mind, these are not TARP recipients.  These are private companies who made good faith investments in Chrysler and would be stealing from their clients if they agreed to a deal they consider not in their clients’ best interests.  Some of the hedge fund managers and lawyers who are making the accusations are prominent Democratic donors.  One of them risked retribution to write about it here:

http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-this-hedge-fund-managers-not-afraid-of-big-bad-obama-2009-5

There’s also more background on it here from my favorite blog:

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2009/05/023497.php

Some of those who like Obama presumably also believe in capitalism and the rule of law.  This Chrysler case, even more so than some of the shenanigans with the government refusing to allow banks to pay back their TARP loans — is an affront to the rule of law.

BO – Stand-up comic genius!!

I hate to think that the treasure trove of humor which is Obama (and especially Biden) would be lost on half of America. For example, did you see the joke O played on the media yesterday with his announcement yesterday about closing tax loopholes?  It was Geithner.  Get it? HILARIOUS!!  I don’t know where he comes up with this stuff, but BO should totally do stand-up.  Wait, no, those guys actually have to memorize their lines. Nevermind.  😉

Isn't the simplest explanation that he's just not that smart?

Another repurposed email 😉

. . . So it turns out that Obama relied on an angry left blogger for his assertion that Churchill eschewed torture, a claim which anyone with a passing knowledge of history would have recognized as false, and which the White House has now confirmed came from Andrew Sullivan:

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2009/05/023484.php

More interesting in the post is that it asserts — correctly I believe — that Obama displays an astonishing lack of understanding of history.  It makes reference to his earlier use of the Kennedy-Kruschev meeting as an example of why we should talk to our enemies when, in fact, anyone familiar with the meetings, even Kennedy accolytes, would agree that the meeting was a disastrous embarrassment for the United States and showed Kennedy as weak and inexperienced.  It invited the Cuban Missile Crisis which brought the world to the brink of destruction.

This is actually the same point that a really smart guy I know made as recently as 10 months ago:

Undecided as in Obama versus McCain.  Obama‘s comments on a single,
contiguous Palestinian State demonstrates a real lack of understanding
of the complexity for Middle Eastern politics.

I don’t care about misstatements — Bush made them all the time and if anything it only made him seem like more of a real person.  It also gave him the chance to demonstrate a humility and self-effacing style that I think we’d both agree is not exactly one of Obama’s most notable characteristics.  But the things I’m talking about, and the things which worry me, are not misstatements.  They’re increasingly obvious examples of the fact that Obama simply knows very little about history or the world around him.  You or I wouldn’t have quoted Sullivan’s anecdote on Churchill — not because we don’t trust Sullivan (though I don’t of course) but because we both know enough about history to know that there’s no reason to remotely suspect that a tough-as-nails bad-ass like Winston Churchill would ever have said something as stupid and painty-waisted as “We don’t torture” or that “The reason was that Churchill understood, you start taking shortcuts and, over time, that corrodes what’s best in people. It corrodes the best of the country.”  We’d have questioned the story cause it doesn’t fit into any intelligent historical context that we’ve ever read.

The left talks about how Obama is the most intellectual President we’ve ever had, but it’s noteworthy that he’s released nothing of his academic record, he wrote no articles for the Law Review, he wouldn’t release grades, scores, theses, etc.  The only thing we know is that he graduated without honors from Columbia.  He produced no meaningful legislation either in the Illinois State Senate or in the US Senate, so the basis for people’s assertion that he is intellectual is that he delivers beautiful speeches.

As someone who delivers speeches for a living I know that if there’s an indication of a speaker’s intelligence it’s not his ability to read beautiful words that someone else writes.  Plenty of people with high double-digit IQs could read my written speech off a state of the art teleprompter and sound as intelligent as I do when I deliver it.  The difference is that I know my material.  I learn it frontwards and backwards, and if the power goes out in the middle of a presentation (as it did once thanks to California’s rolling blackouts 😉 I can continue to teach without the computer or the slides, describing the data and the graphics which my audience would otherwise be viewing.  Contrast this with Obama’s repeated inability to operate for even moments without the crutch of his teleprompter, and it becomes much less clear to me why his skill in reading is mistaken by some for intelligence.

Think about the times when he’s spoken without a teleprompter — the “lipstick on a pig” gaffe (which is when they started putting him on an all-teleprompter diet by the way), the “Special Olympics” gaffe on the Tonight Show, the Churchill misquote, and my personal favorite this one where he got ahead of his teleprompter, this one where he suggests giving Breathalyzer’s to kids with asthma and then goes off on a nearly Biden-esque ramble.  And then there’s the video from Europe where he thinks that they speak Austrian in Austria.

I understand the evidence that proves his naiivete to me is not compelling to my Obamacon friends, but they’re not seeing any of this in the mainstream press.  They’re seeing it (presumably) only from me.  If (and I don’t think this is the case, but if) it turned out that there were 2 events like this every day, or 10, or 100, would they at some point start to think they’d been lied to about O being the smartest and dreamiest guy ever to occupy the Oval?

And continuing my long tirade over the fawning media coverage which prevents any real scrutiny of the damage Obama is doing, it’s worth noting that even the liberal Pew Center has now documented, based on quantitative measures and actual data, that Obama received twice as much positive coverage in his first 100 days than Bush, and 50% more than Clinton.

http://hotair.com/archives/2009/05/04/pew-media-treatment-of-obama-much-more-positive-than-bush-clinton/

In the end, people will hopefully be swayed more by results than they will by the increasingly obvious cheerleading by the press.  We haven’t talked much about the trillion dollar deficits or the coming inflation and taxation, but that’s a worthwhile discussion as well, and one that’ll be much harder for the media to hide.  At the rate Obama is borrowing, there is, historically, a near-zero chance of avoiding high levels of inflation similar to or greater than what we saw under Carter.  Telling people how dreamy the President is while they’re facing constantly rising prices and higher tax bills gets to be a big task even for Chris Matthews.

But seriously, these quantitative studies of media fawning, hopefully make it easier to understand why I absolutely positively celebrate every time another major newspaper goes under.  I think it’s an event worth celebrating as a free market for information — something we absolutely lack in the country right now — is critical to the success of the democracy.

Liberals have hope, conservatives have common sense

I’m lazy, so here’s another post consisting just of an email I sent to a liberal friend . . .

Dear xx,

I feel bad for the left sometimes . . . the fact that so many leftist ideals and beliefs are so easily dispelled with facts (stubborn things indeed) makes it too easy to be a conservative. In that vein, I’ll start with your ending:

You are also wrong to think that there was no coverage of the Tea Parties this week on the regular news outlets: NPR, CNN, Times, WSJ, ABC, CBS, NBC all covered it.  And no name calling was involved.

I wasn’t planning on sending this article to you because, frankly, I suspect you’ll find it funny.  But on the other hand, I don’t mind if the over-reaching left laughs all the way to a President Gingrich 🙂  So read this article and then please get back to me about the high journalistic standards you appreciate in the mainstream press and how they respectfully covered the protests without any name-calling.  It’s a detailed rundown of how anchors from Anderson Cooper on down chose to make crude middle-school sexual references about protesters rather than covering the issues people were protesting.

I don’t think I was suggesting that there was *no* coverage of the events.  Rather, the same media that worked itself into a frothy lather every time 8 Code Pink activists would chain themselves to a damn vending machine didn’t show up for the 1000 everyday Americans who peaceably assembled in front of the White House yesterday to express outrage over profligate spending.  And the few who did spent more time covering the three — yes, three — counter-protesters than they did the 1000 protesters.  Fair and balanced, eh?

Moreover, it’d demonstrably you who are wrong in suggesting that there was no name calling. I have video 🙂  Here’s how one of the darlings of your media discussed the grassroots gathering of several hundred thousand Americans yesterday.  “It’s hard to talk when you’re tea-bagging.” Anderson would know, apparently. Watching the mainstream press for news is like living in a fraternity house for the intellectual discourse.  But run along, Countdown’s on soon.

By the way, when I wrote about how much fun it is to watch liberals alternately justify or bemoan all the ways Obama has let them down and broken his word to them over the first few months of his reign . . . I was talking about your first few paragraphs.  Granted, you’re OK with some of the things he’s broken promises on because you’re an intelligent guy and recognize that the first time Obama allows a terrorist act to be committed against America he’ll become the last Democrat to hold the White House for a decade or so.  And based on the chilly response that his mea culpa tour of Europe and Turkey got him, I’m calling “fail” on the strategy that if we just prostrate ourselves they’ll stop hating us so much.  It’s now Iran that’s telling us they won’t engage in direct talks until we take concrete actions.  O’s gotta be thinking, “How the hell did *that* happen?”

But the ones in whom the disappointment is really epic are the true-believers.  The ones who organized for the first time, who voted for the first time, who donated for the first time, who came to rallies, who set up Greek columns, who gathered nectar and ambrosia for the rallies.  They did all that because they thought O was going to usher in a global regime of hopenchange, and they’re already saying, “How the hell did *this* happen?”  (Here they are fretting over Obama’s holding of prisoners at Bagram in Afghanistan).  All poiliticians make and break campaign promises, but most of us are savvy enough to manage expectations, and the media usually pushes back along the way.  With O you have the delightful combination of voters (not all by any means, but enough to put him over the top) who didn’t know the first thing about politics, government or Obama, and a media that painted him as not the second coming of Christ, but the first.  It’s quite a lot to live up to, and no one could live up to it, certainly not O. So you think all those disillusioned people — the ones who in exit poll surveys thought the Republicans control Congress because Bush was in the White House — think they’ll be back to re-elect BO in ’12?  Will they even show up to defend their Congressmen in ’10?

As to keeping secrets, today Eric Holder released the most detailed set of memos yet from the Bush administration OLC (Office of Legal Counsel) describing interrogation techniques.  Think those things work as well once the bad guys read about them? I don’t.  Something tells me waterboarding works even better if someone thinks they’re actually being drowned, but who knows . . . And by the way, read the CNN article linked above.  All of these so called “torture” methods are roughly equivalent to what the seniors on the water polo team made us all do as Freshman.  Torture is forcing an innocent civilian to choose between burning to death in their office or jumping out of a 110 story window to die 10 seconds later when they crash into the pavement.  Making the terrorist who organized that attack stand around naked or sleep in a dark cell IS NOT TORTURE!!  It’s HAZING!!  Patrick Leahy in the CNN article is coming to the defense of poor hapless terrorists mistreated because they were forced to sleep in a room with a bug they knew not to be painful or dangerous.  Yeah, hard to remember how Dems ever got tagged as being soft on crime.

Given that I’ve laid our several cases where prominent blogs CAUGHT intentional or sloppy errors in the MSM, and you’ve not yet provided me with any of the opposite, I’m still curious why 60 minutes with the obviously faked documents is a reliable source in your mind, but the detailed and tenacious analysis of PowerLine is blogoblablablah.  The obvious answer that I keep coming back to is you like what 60 Minutes has to say, and you don’t like what PowerLine has to say, but seriously, who was the better journalist that day — Dan Rather or PL’s Scott?  Read that first PowerLine post about the forgeries and tell me that’s not the kind of journalism that would make Woodward and Bernstein proud.

My point with the interrogations, Gitmo, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc, is that these are all Bush policies that Obama railed against as a candidate and fully adopted as President.  And plenty of his policies go even further.  The DHS report which you dismissed as only talking about “white supremacist and violent antigovernment groups, and that there are concerns that these blatantly racist and anti-Semitic groups gain momentum during times of economic down turn” in fact goes much further in associating mainstream conservative views such as opposition to Obama policies, opposition to abortion and favoring of state and local government over federal authority (enshrined in the Constitution last time I checked) with “right wing extremism”.  As to the report being a Bush report as opposed to an Obama report, I think you’d agree that the references to Obama, to 2009, to the economic downturn, to the existence of an African American President, etc etc, all make it pretty clear when the report was written and who was in charge.  The report may have been *started* in 2008, but I don’t have any problem at all with DHS issuing a report on right-wing extremism.  What is chilling and disgusting, and what any objective reader should find concerning, is the way this organ of the White House lumps those who oppose O’s policies in with Timothy McVeigh, in the process slandering millions of veterans because of 19 who are confirmed to have joined extrmist groups.  Hmm . . . 19 . . . where’ve I heard that number.  I guess that means O’s next DHS report will call out all Muslims as threats on the basis of the 19 who became 9/11 hijackers, right?

O did deliver his speech at Georgetown in a church.  And the White House asked the church to cover up religious symbols before the speech.  I assume this is a matter of not wanting the competition from another Messiah in the room, but who knows  🙂

Finally, because Obama makes reality of what I intend as farce, here’s one of his new appointees laying out her plan for government bailout and licensing of media.  Does your side even own copies of the Constitution?  Can I email one to Obama?  He should totally read it, it’s a great document.

–Jason

Wait a minute . . . he's a Socialist?

Even liberals are starting to notice we’ve elected an empty suit and a teleprompter:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/03/23/campbell.brown.transparency/index.html#cnnSTCText

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/03/24/cafferty.economy/index.html?iref=topnews

Keep in mind, these were both enthusiastic Obama cheerleaders, even in recent weeks.  Granted, based on their writings it is also safe to conclude that they’re also both intellectual midgets, but this is as close to liberal media scrutiny as I’ve yet seen of BO.  Check out the harsh language Campbell Brown uses to end her recount of the utter lack of Obama’s promised transparency:

“As for President Obama’s promise of a five-day public review once a bill leaves Capitol Hill headed for his desk, it would be nice if he kept his word on this going forward.”

Go get ’em Campbell!!