Yesterday, Juan Williams of Fox News doubled down on his accusation that Republican presidential candidates are using “racial code words.”

Today, Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic has followed suit with an article rehashing the tired allegation that Republicans are using so-called “dog whistle” tactics–“the use of coded, ambiguous language to appeal to the prejudices of certain subsets of voters”–i.e. white voters (Democrats’ use of race to appeal to the prejudices and fears of black voters is rarely subject to scrutiny.)

Jeffrey Goldberg (Photo: Bloomberg News)

Goldberg says that the Obama’s Republican opponents have alleged the following (original links, including one to Media Matters–itself the subject of serious charges of antisemitism–included):

Black people have lost the desire to perform a day’s work. Black people rely on food stamps provided to them by white taxpayers. Black people, including Barack and Michelle Obama, believe that the U.S. owes them something because they are black. Black children should work as janitors in their high schools as a way to keep them from becoming pimps. And the pathologies afflicting black Americans are caused partly by the Democratic Party, which has created in them a dependency on government not dissimilar to the forced dependency of slaves on their owners.

I’ll go even further, and admit that I personally heard a presidential candidate give a speech–in a church, no less–in which he blasted the black community, and black men in particular, for the phenomenon of single-parent households; who noted that black children with absent fathers have a greater chance of becoming criminals; who scolded black parents, “don’t just sit in the house and watch ‘Sports Center’ all weekend long”; and who told blacks to “read a book once in awhile.”

That candidate was Barack Obama.

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With the roaring success “The Undefeated” has already had at changing the conversation about Sarah Palin from tanning beds and crosshair maps to, you know, her actual record as a public servant, the Left and their dishonest allies in the MSM are obviously as worried as they are desperate. As a result, this morning at “The Atlantic” we’re greeted with a 950+ word article filled with precious NPR-esque prose and the delicate pose of a journalist just reporting the difficult truth, all under the following headline:

Sarah Palin Movie Debuts to Empty Theater in Orange County

We’re then told:

It isn’t strictly accurate to say that I sat through the whole movie alone. Just as the previews started, two young women walked in giggling together and took seats three rows behind me. Afraid that they’d ruined the only story I had at that point — What If Sarah Palin Starred in a Movie and No One Showed Up? — I hoped they’d at least oblige me with an interview, and so they did.

From there, the corrupt MSM has been gleefully off and running and amplifying the glorious news:

The hard-left film site Movie Line:

Empty Theaters, 0% Positive Reviews Greet Sarah Palin Documentary

New York Magazine:

For the debut of the Sarah Palin documentary, Atlantic scribe Conor Frieserdorf was alone in an Orange County, California, theater, one of just ten nationwide showing The Undefeated.

Frum Forum:

Palin Movie Opens to No Crowds

Salon:

Palin movie debuts to an audience of empty seats

And naturally, Politico’s Ben Smith of the Tanning Bed Smiths:

The Unwatched

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In an argument (usually a political debate), a concern troll is someone who is on one side of the discussion, but pretends to be a supporter of the other side with “concerns”. The idea behind this is that your opponents will take your arguments more seriously if they think you’re an ally. – Urban Dictionary

Before she’s even announced her decision as to whether or not to run for president, according to a new Gallup poll, Governor Sarah Palin currently sits in second place among 11 announced and/or potential GOP candidates. Gee, how did that happen? After all, the MSM told me Palin was irrelevant (usually in 1200 word articles obsessing over one of her tweets or the tweets of one of her staffers).

Ezra Klein’s sinister Journolist might be dismantled (though I suspect it lives on elsewhere), but “journ-o-lism” has always been alive and well and lately, when it comes to their unrelenting  and somewhat perverse need to demolish a mother of five, the corrupt path of Obama’s MSM Palace Guards has gone a little something like this: After pulling a minding-her-own-business Sarah Palin out of her Wasilla home in order to beat her about the neck and shoulders for causing that terrible crime in Tucson,  led by this rocket scientist, it was decided the time had come to ignore Palin and write her political obituary.

Indulge my backing up just a bit here …

You have to keep in mind that journ-o-lism is just another term to describe how dishonest journ-o-lists conspire to create corrupt narratives. Have you ever noticed how the MSM almost never competes for stories? What I mean is that nine times out of ten they all cover the exact same things with the exact same emphasis. Why is that?  You would think that in order to stand out from the herd, ABC News would sell a Whopper to compete with NBC’s Big Mac. Or that the Washington Post would come up with Pepsi to the New York Times’ Coke.  Don’t even get me started on Mountain Dew.

The reason for this is that the MSM isn’t about The News, it’s about The Agenda, and what they do is no different than what they accuse Big Business of doing. Only instead of conspiring through a secret monopoly with other companies to fix prices, they conspire through a secret monopoly of other media outlets to create a version of the truth –which we call The Narrative.  The word goes out and suddenly….

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Well, the earthquake we all waited for finally hit. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) unveiled his budget proposal for the next ten years. Originally expected to include $4 trillion in cuts, it ended up with more than $6 trillion. As expected, the liberal media was apoplectic and the knives have been drawn to cut him down. Within hours of its release, the condescension flowed.

Derek Thompson in the Atlantic started off well, insulting the intelligence of Republicans in general and Paul Ryan specifically.

“Republicans faced mockery in the last few years for inventing their own words. Rep. Paul Ryan did them one better. He invented his own math.”

It doesn’t get any better; it’s mostly filled with ad hominem attacks with one or two attempts at criticizing some small points. Sitting upon his safe perch, not required to deal with the realities of the situation the country finds itself in, Mr. Thompson is unable to even suggest a possible solution beyond the Status Quo.

I’d like to extend Mr. Thompson a helping hand, explaining some things here. Without some serious reduction in future entitlements, the United States will be insolvent sooner than later. Following the profligate spending of the last few years, the current deficit is equal to GDP. That can’t go on.

In any event, Mr. Thompson specifically lays down fire on the Medicare/Medicaid section of proposal. Clearly, the best way to do this is through fear-mongering. Seniors are going to lose all their medical care! Panic! He also takes issue with the fact that, instead of the Federal government overseeing Medicaid, it would reduce the amount put in and let each state work it out to the best of its ability. Never mind the supercilious idea that only the folks in Washington can run this stuff. The fact is, the closer to the final recipient is to the management team/ bureaucracy, the more efficient the system is. So yes, “Less Federal Spending + Less Local Spending = Better Care,” since the providers won’t be worried about dealing with a one size fits no one federal mandate.

Thompson tries to make fun of Ryan’s idea that cutting federal spending will produce jobs. This is counter-intuitive! The source of all good and all work is, of course, the central government. Empirically, that’s just not true. The last two and half years are proof of that. An increase in federal spending of unprecedented proportions has not only failed to create jobs anywhere but in the public sector, but has heralded in an era of staggering unemployment. Even the government sector has seen a loss of about 350,000 jobs.

So, let me tell Mr. Thompson something: reducing the scope of the federal government leaves a vacuum for certain services. Those services will be provided by the private sector at lower cost and greater efficiency leaving more money in the private sector to invest and, guess what? Yeah, create more jobs.

Really, the only one with the fuzzy math here is Thompson. They say gambling is a tax on the mathematically challenged, so what do you call doubling down on ideas that have proven to be a failure?

A memo obtained from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence indicates the Washington Post is preparing to “publish articles and an interactive website that will likely contain a compendium of government agencies and contractors allegedly conducting Top Secret work.” You can view the memo below.  The series is likely to launch Monday.

WaPo’s Dana Priest

According to another memo from Art House, the director of communications for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the series will be written up by Dana Priest and culminates two years of research. He postulates Priest is likely to advocate:

• The intelligence enterprise has undergone exponential growth and has become unmanageable with overlapping authorities and a heavily outsourced contractor workforce.
• The IC [intelligence community] and the DoD have wasted significant time and resources, especially in the areas of counterterrorism and counterintelligence.
• The intelligence enterprise has taken its eyes off its post-9/11 mission and is spending its energy on competitive and redundant programs.

Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic reports, “Priest’s story is said to focus on redundancies, particularly the number of individual counter-terrorism analytical cells costing the government billions of dollars. Some of the redundancy is deliberate because of the nature of intelligence work. But a lot of redundancy, especially in terms of information technology, is probably just wasteful.”

The Washington Post is also working on a television component with PBS’s Frontline. (more…)