As everyone except the left knows and understands, the U.S. military is representative of the finest elements of American society, but you’d never know it from the attitude of the scared-of-inanimate-objects MSM, who have never picked up a gun, served in the armed forces, grown up in the military, or have the slightest idea what sort of people we ask to stand on the wall, keeping watch against the terrors of the night.

So that’s why they should watch this:

Col White is right: the best and brightest really are in the armed services, not prancing around the Harvard campus. (more…)

*** Updated and Clarified

Out here along the Picketwire, we were mighty surprised ten years ago when we heard about an historian back east who’d proved that nobody to speak of had actually owned guns back in early America. This came as a big surprise, because it wasn’t what we’d heard from our daddies and granddaddies. But this historian, Michael Bellesiles by name, had all the facts and figures to prove it. This was pretty cheering to the New York Times’ reviewer (Garry Wills, “Spiking the Gun Myth,”), who said Professor Bellesiles had “dispersed the darkness that covered the gun’s early history in America” and provided “overwhelming evidence that our view of the gun is as deep a superstition as any that affected Native Americans in the 17th century.” Apparently a lot of people agreed, because Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture was given the Bancroft Prize.

Well, you probably know what happened. Some gun nuts and spoilsports started looking into Professor Bellesiles’ research, and it turned out that the evidence Garry Wills was so happy about didn’t actually exist. Professor Bellesiles had made it up, and the press had eaten it up. “Now many of Mr. Bellesiles’s defenders have gone silent,” the Times had to report a year later (Robert Worth, “Historian’s Prizewinning Book on Guns is Embroiled in a Scandal“):

Over the past year a number of scholars who have examined his sources say he has seriously misused historical records and possibly fabricated them. They say the outcome, when all the evidence is in, could be one of the worst academic scandals in years.

And in the end, they took his Bancroft Prize away, and he lost his job at Emory University in Atlanta. (more…)

In case you’re wondering who this is, his name is Col. Allen West, and he’s a candidate for Congress in Florida. Col.  West is running against Ron Klein in the 22nd district, which includes Broward and Palm Beach counties in south Florida; one might think an intelligent, articulate (he speaks without a teleprompter!), plain-spoken African American with a provable record of leadership and accomplishment (and some controversy in his military background) would be catnip to the MSM, but one would be wrong.

The media hit its high-water mark of electoral influence with its elevation of Barack Hussein Obama to the presidency in 2008, but with that accomplishment now ebbing away like the livelihood of the Gulf States in the face of the oil spill and the federal government’s continuing, inexplicable inaction, about all that’s left for them is to act as blocking backs: they know you’ll never trust them again, but they can still deny the oxygen of publicity to candidates they’d just as soon see defeated or destroyed.

(more…)

Surging Massachusetts Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown has served more than thirty years in the Army National Guard, but to commentators like the Boston Globe’s Joan Vennochi, this is merely “pretty packaging” and part of how “Brown’s glossy veneer conceals [a] misleading campaign.”

It’s sad, but not surprising that the liberal media – and it is hard to find any newspaper more liberal than the Martha Coakley-endorsing Boston Globe – would want to minimize and denigrate Brown’s three decades of service to our country.  After all, when a liberal politician has actually served it’s so unusual that it becomes the centerpiece of his campaign.

But, of course, Coakley has served, too – not in the Army, but in a comfortable office with many minions to get her coffee and knock over pesky reporters who dare to ask hard questions.  She has “served” as the Bay State’s attorney general and, as Vennochi helpfully points out, she has prosecuted scam artists, child molesters and murderers (although even that claim is dubious).  Presumably, this distinguishes her from all those other attorney generals out there who strongly support the work of scam artists, child molesters and murderers. (more…)