Martin Bashir has situational concern for race. His remarks from his program the other evening:
“It also showed how political leaders could be responsible for either encouraging better race relations or making matters a whole lot worse by using cheap and nasty slurs Now listen to some of the things being said by these republican candidates.”
“A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.”
Joe Biden:
“I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”
Or this Biden classic:
“You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.”
- It’s so bizarre to watch this interview considering how Bill Clinton used the IRS to go after people like O’Reilly. Still, the Clinton survival instinct can make them seem almost likable at times, due to the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” rule. That being said, the one thing you can depend on more than Obama’s arrogance is the Clintons’s backchannel maneuvering to circumvent an Obama presidency. If Hillary had any intent on stepping back into the ring, we’d see Bill distancing himself from the president and Clinton cronies in action. Obama’s selection of Hillary as SOS was “keeping his enemy closer.”
We don’t need paid professionals to do retweeting for us. They’re slicing up the attention pie thinner and thinner, giving us retreaded rehashes of warmed over news, all hoping for a bit of attention because the issue is trending. We can leave that to the unpaid, I think.
The hard part of professional journalism going forward is writing about what hasn’t been written about, directing attention where it hasn’t been, and saying something new.
Jay Gray, the NBC News reporter covering the Jerry Sandusky sex abuse scandal in State College, Pennsylvania, was arrested on drunk driving charges after he attended a drunken football-watching party at Sandusky’s lawyer’s house, reports say.
The Pennsylvania State Police arrested Gray just before 2am December 12 during a traffic stop.
He was allegedly at the home of Joe Amendola, the eccentric lawyer defending Sandusky against allegations he molested 10 boys over the course of several years …
According to TMZ, Mr Amendola invited Gray and several other reporters over to his house to watch the New York Giants-Dallas Cowboys game.
The reporters, reportedly, were all vying for exclusive interviews with Sandusky, who has only further raised public suspicious about himself in two awkward media appearances, says TMZ.
So reporters get drunk with the creepy lawyer of an “alleged” kid toucher in order to impress him and score an exclusive? Yes, please keep lecturing to new media about “ethics,” MSM.
Over a period of just three and a half days, NBC, CBS and ABC have developed an insatiable hunger for the Herman Cain sexual harassment story, devoting an incredible 50 stories to the allegations since Monday morning. In contrast, over a similar period these networks mostly ignored far more substantial and serious scandals relating to Bill Clinton.
This pattern continued on Wednesday night and into Thursday as the evening newscasts and morning shows highlighted the story 19 times. On Good Morning America, Brian Ross offered innuendo and slung gossip, recounting, “But behind the scenes, several of the campaigns are still urging reporters to continue to dig, George, saying, there’s more to be found in the private life of Herman Cain.” [MP3 audio here.]
Without offering facts, Ross described Cain’s time as head of the National Restaurant Association: “It fits with the kind of culture we were told that existed there, with young women who had been, sort of, lobbyists for the restaurant association, working with various states. They were the new ones, the young ones. And they say that’s where Cain often socialized.” (more…)
It is absolutely amazing to watch as the media continues to attempt the character assassination of Herman Cain, who is by all accounts a decent and honorable Christian family man. The most recent allegation leveled against him involves unsubstantiated claims of sexual harassment and invisible accusers. The game plan as of the third day is obvious. Level an attack with very few details and allow the candidate to tell the story and defend himself while you tear him down.
Cain is playing it straight and has shared details on an incident where he apparently compared the height of a female employee to that of his wife. In today’s world of undercarriage tweets, this does not rise to the level of sexual harassment. More to the point, if this is all that Cain’s detractors have against him, he may just be the cleanest candidate the left wing has ever seen!
Worlds apart–that is where we are right now. In the media’s view, we should respect John Edwards, who fathered a child with his political consultant while married to a woman fighting a losing battle with cancer. In the view of the left wing, a man with over 30 years of business experience should have to defend himself against spurious charges from unknown accusers while the President they never vetted takes notes.
While the libs inhabit “Race Card World,” Americans are asking: where was Politico during the Obama campaign? Where are Obama’s transcripts from kindergarten on up through law school? Where are his college girlfriends? For that matter, media outlets, could you please produce any person that knew Obama from any time in his past? The double standard is unacceptable and will no longer be tolerated. (more…)
He has written about having sex with an underage girl, and claims he once threatened to kill a pregnant girlfriend unless she had an abortion. He claims to hate marijuana, but recommends heroin as the cure for suburban boredom. He mocks “Tea Baggers” and scorns “hippies.” His Russian newspaper was shuttered after a government crackdown, and he’s a regular on The Dylan Ratigan Show on MSNBC.
Meet Mark Ames, the provocateur who created the Koch brothers conspiracy theory.
Long before John Podesta’s Center for American Progress began targeting the Koch brothers for their supposed role in the Tea Party, and two years before the Kochs were cast as the villains of public sector union protests in Wisconsin, Ames had already shaped the Koch brothers meme.
Ames and co-author Yasha Levine launched the conspiracy theory–and its twin themes of drug abuse and gay sex–with a blog post (now removed) at Playboy.com in February 2009, entitled: “Backstabber: Is Rick Santelli High on Koch?” They published almost exactly the same article at their own site, exiledonline.com, as “Exposing the Rightwing PR Machine: Is CNBC’s Rick Santelli Sucking Koch?”
Ames and Levine alleged that Santelli’s famous “rant heard around the world” that inspired the Tea Party movement “was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger” for an “anti-Obama campaign.” That campaign, they claimed, had been planned for months before the 2008 election, and funded by “the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America, and funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups.”
Ames would later explain that he had been inspired to write about the Kochs by his experiences in post-Soviet Moscow, when he edited a sensational newspaper, the eXile–described last year by Vanity Fair as “arguably the most abusive, defamatory, un-evenhanded, and crassest publication in Russia” before it closed in 2008. (more…)
It was a tale of two media biases: One make-believe scandal pursued vigorously by the media. One authentic scandal vigorously dismissed by the media.
Earlier this month, the mainstream media released 24,000 pages of former Gov. Sarah Palin’s emails in pursuit of a scandal that did not exist. The Washington Post even asked its readers to sift through the emails themselves and “annotate the documents displayed on the Post website.”
The strategy backfired. Palin’s emails revealed nothing embarrassing or incriminating. No crime. No underwear shots. No yfrog photos in the Alaska gym.
Nothing.
Instead, left-leaning media outlets had to content themselves with fluff stories analyzing Palin’s “level of intellect” based on the unremarkable email cache. For instance, the Huffington Post reported that, “Palin’s emails were written at 8th grade level, an excellent score for a chief executive.” But – wait for it – Post reporters are still investigating a suspicious gap in Palin’s emails. Clearly, for the mainstream media, this was not the best of times.
On Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, Jon Stewart dismissed the idea that the Palin email story was rooted in media bias. “If your contention is that they [the media] are relentlessly partisan, then why haven’t they backed away from Weiner?” asked Stewart, who maintains that Fox News is the only biased media outlet. In his own words, he has characterized Fox as “a relentless agenda-driven, 24-hour news opinion propaganda delivery system.”
But when asked by Wallace whether other media outlets pushed an agenda, Stewart’s own bias became apparent. “Would you say the same thing about them [ABC, CBS, NBC, New York Times, Washington Post] that they are — in your words — a propaganda delivery system relentlessly pushing a liberal agenda?”
“No, I wouldn’t say that,” said Stewart.
Apparently, when it comes to media bias, Stewart has a faulty memory. The mainsteam media initially dismissed the Weiner story. Some media bought his “hacker” storyline. Early on, some – forgive the pun – poked fun at his underwear photo and dismissed it as harmless. Others sympathized with Weiner’s dilemma, blaming it on the advent of the new media.
In the end, it was not ABC, NBC, or the Washington Post that broke the Weiner sexting scandal story. That distinction belongs to (now vindicated) conservative blogger and author Andrew Breitbart, who, along with Big Journalism Editor Dana Loesch, had been accused of hacking Weiner’s Twitter and yfrog accounts. However, once Weiner’s pictures hit the Internet, even the unwilling media were forced to cover the story, leading to the embattled congressman’s resignation on Friday.
So much for Stewart’s flimsy claim of mainstream media objectivity, eh?
As with Bill Clinton before him, Anthony Weiner has managed to spotlight the ironic discrepancy between what feminists say and the things for which they stand.
A NY head of NOW remarked to the New York Daily News that the group is “trying to give him the benefit of the doubt.”
The head of the Brooklyn/Queens chapter of the National Organization for Women said she could separate Weiner’s sexcapades from the liberal track record that earned the group’s support.
“I wasn’t happy to discover that my congressman is a 14-year-old boy,” said Julie Kirshner, president of the NOW chapter.
“But he happens to be one of the best politicians out there, so we’re in a bad position. We’re trying to give him the benefit of the doubt.”
Feminist Amanda Marcotte, who previously carried water for John Edwards, called the reporting of a congressman’s lewd photo scandal “new standards” of which we should all fear. She was taken down eleventy notches by The Other McCain:
Note how Ms. Marcotte deploys “ideologue” as an epithet against Breitbart when she is herself an avowed adherent of the ideology of feminism. Indeed, if it weren’t for her idolatrous devotion to feminism, Ms. Marcotte would have nothing to write about. Her entire raison d’êtreas a writer is to filter the world through a feminist lens.
She is one of those writers who, despairing of achieving notoriety in the larger literary world, seeks a readership in some ghetto niche occupied almost entirely by third-rate talents, so that her occasional second-rate contributions appear conspicuously impressive by comparison. And in her feminist niche, the only standard by which anyone may be judged is according to their zealous devotion to The Sacred Cause:
Weiner has an outstanding record supporting sexual rights of others, with100% ratings from NARAL and Planned Parenthood, and has a strong record of support for gay rights.
See? He votes the right way. And isn’t that what really matters?
[...]
Amanda Marcotte is her own insoluble problem, and the appeal of politics to such an irreparably warped personality is that it appears to make sense of her alienation from society. All she needs to do is to re-frame her grievances in an ideological context — to say that “sexists” or the “right-wing smear machine” or some other such politicized bogeyman is to blame for her own unhappiness — and suddenly she is no longer a whining malcotent, but a heroic crusader for social justice.
Maybe she’s just waxing fangirl to score a spot on Weiner’s mayoral campaign? She asserts that investigation into or reporting on Weiner’s acts constitutes a “violation of sexual privacy.” Two tough lessons progressives have to learn here:
1. When you open the door of sexual investigation you can’t close it again. It was fine for the left to absurdly question the parentage of Trig Palin; it was fine to make hay out of the GOP perverts, so it’s newsworthy to report on Weiner. These are the standards the left themselves set.
2. There is no expectation of “sexual privacy” when there is a possibility that you Tweeted photos of your schlong from your congressional office or congressional gym.
**UPDATE: I missed this earlier, but in another tweet, Kurtz offered the Clinton sex scandal–the one Kurtz’s Newsweek attempted to kill–as an example of unbiased media coverage of a Democrat sex scandal! The hubris is breathtaking. Kurtz also suggests that the old media handled the Spitzer and Edwards scandals admirably. More here.
***
From the NewsBeast/CNN news guy:
According to another tweet, he meant tweeps, not twerps.
A quick response to the guy who defended the HuffPo Breitbart front-page ban and got the Sherrod story wrong: Even if the infamous Weinergate image was “faked,” that means someone hacked into a sitting congressman’s verified twitter account and posted porn. THAT’S STILL NEWS! Why not report it as a developing story, just like we have here at the Bigs? If Kurtz truly believes Rep. Weiner is the victim of a hack-attack, why wouldn’t he cover the story for that reason?
Kurtz later walked back this statement by tweeting, “of course reporters should have looked into Weiner hacking controversy.” To paraphrase Kurtz, sometimes it pays to think a second time.
I know Tina Brown took over Newsweek last year, but if this is the way their top-tier journalists are treating potential Democrat sex scandals (real or “faked”), this invites the question: has anything really changed? You may recall it was Newsweekwhich killed Michael Isikoff’s Monica Lewinsky/Bill Clinton affair scoop over a decade ago. The Drudge Report picked it up, and conservative new media was born. So, we who make our livings in the new media all owe a debt of gratitude to Newsweek employees and their rich history of protecting Democrats, but America deserves better.
There is a lot of factually inaccurate information out on the Internet and Bill Clinton doesn’t like it. He also has a solution. If you guessed that it would be to encourage more speech out there to counter it then you’re probably not well acquainted with Democrats. Well, obviously, we need a new government agency which would be in charge of make sure everything on the Internet is on the up and up.
It would, of course, have to be totally independent to maintain credibility. It would be taxpayer funded, which throws a bit of a wrench into the works seeing as somebody in government will be signing the checks. Mr. Clinton, who says it’s a legitimate thing to do, suggests that this independent federal agency would be structured as such that the president wouldn’t be able to influence anything it does. That would be an overt conflict of interest, people wouldn’t trust such a body to not insert their own spin on things.
“That is, it would be like, I don’t know, National Public Radio or BBC or something like that, except it would have to be really independent and they would not express opinions, and their mandate would be narrowly confined to identifying relevant factual errors.”
In other words, absolutely nothing like NPR or BBC, which are absolutely rife with bias, spin and factual errors. Of course, citations would be needed. I’m not sure what they would cite, though. If a New York Times article is written by someone who wasn’t actually there and fabricated the story out of whole cloth would that still work? Maybe Wikipedia?
Bill Clinton wants the government to “correct” what you say on the Internet, folks. Should the government listen to the former panderer-in-chief, we’ll go from Big Brother to Big Bubba on the ol’ Internet tubes.
Bubba is not happy with what he claims is the “misinformation” on the Internet and he wants the force of government to stop it all. Politico is reporting that Clinton makes the proposal in an upcoming CNBC interview saying, “It would be a legitimate thing to do.”
No, Bubba, it would not.
Clinton says that the idea of having a government agency that “corrects” the “misinformation” on the Internet would be “independent” of government so it isn’t a traditional government agency. This, he feels would make it all A-OK with those fearing Big Brother government ministries of propaganda.
Washington (AP) – In a stunning announcement this morning on The Today Show,Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told host Matt Lauer she will leave the Administration and challenge Barack Obama for the 2012 Democratic Presidential nomination.
Transcript follows:
LAUER: Thanks for coming on, Madame Secretary. Let’s get right to it: will you seek the Presidency next year?
CLINTON: Yes, Matt. Our country’s heading in the wrong direction way too fast. We must slow down if we wish to delay our collapse by a couple of decades. So I’m reporting for duty.
LAUER: Opens you up to a disloyalty charge.
CLINTON: Somebody has to speak up. Obama’s poll numbers suggest we’re on track to lose both the White House and Senate, Matt. Meanwhile, my numbers are in the stratosphere, mainly because people like you have generously ignored my disastrous tenure at State.
LAUER: [blushing] Well, it’s what we do, Ma’m.
CLINTON: Last week, I offered the President an option to avoid a primary battle. He rejected it.
LAUER: What option?
CLINTON: Replace Biden on the ticket with me. I’d rally the troops. We’d win and, at the least, retain the Senate. Then Obama does the mother of all end runs around the Constitution and names me CP—Co-President. In January, 2012, we take the oath together and deliver dual inaugural addresses. (more…)
I’ve made endless fun of Bill Clinton’s non-accusatory knuckle-pointing, but when perusing media imagery I understand why he did it: you look like a snot wagging your finger about in people’s faces. Sure, he messed up the technique from time to time, but he was lampooned because he more often than not did this:
I must still be recovering from Grandma’s super strong amaretto slushes at the first of our family Christmas parties this past weekend because I could have SWORN that Joe Scarborough almost sounded like a Big Journalism writer here:
Oh my word he did.
“This is curious and it was our staff that did it this time. I’m always curious when there is a controversial issue … that mainstream media doesn’t like, they’ll always will say a George W. Bush appointee or a Reagan appointee … when a Democrat does something unpopular they never say Clinton appointee. Never. Never.”
I was live on air wrapping up my radio show Friday afternoon when I caught the image of Bill Clinton standing behind the presidential podium, in front of the presidential seal. Realizing that Clinton looked much older than for this to be a clip from the 90s, I slid my headphones off right when we cut to break and exclaimed to my news guy, Church, “Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot?”
I’m not sure what was more disturbing: That President Obama jumped ship in the middle of a contentious tax cut battle, leaving Bill Clinton in his stead to assume the duty or that our media didn’t flinch and continued with the questions.
The programmes of the “Two Minutes Hate” varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even — so it was occasionally rumoured — in some hiding-place in Oceania itself. – George Orwell, ‘1984’
In a ghastly cable news convergence Friday, Barack Obama exploited his wife as an excuse and bizarrely abdicated to an unelected civilian, the former president Bill Clinton, in what is surely a historic White House briefing:
For the first part of Clinton’s performance, Obama, the current president, who never acts so freely in the briefing room, calling on reporters at will, stood by stoically watching the spectacle. The television cameras cut Obama out of the shot, making it look for most of the world like Clinton was again president, holding forth before the presidential seal.
When a reporter’s question gave Obama a brief moment to take back the microphones, he seemed to move towards them, but Clinton did not give way. So leaning, Obama said that his wife had been waiting for him for a half hour, at a previously mentioned holiday party, and he was going to leave. “I don’t want to make her mad,” Clinton responded. “Please go.” Indeed.
During the briefing, president Clinton propagated – while at the same time denying – thin euphemisms of redistributionist Marxist doctrine that, “people that benefit most, should pay most. That’s always been my position. Not for class-warfare reasons, but for reasons of fairness.”
During the 2008 campaign, candidate Obama clumsily asserted the same during a debate with Mrs. Clinton and more notoriously, to Joe the Plumber.
President Clinton also gave away the Obama-Democrat tax deal’s game by confessing that this it’s basically a stealth Stimulus II (massive spending bill):
“We have to go beyond direct investments, whether they’re Stimulus projects or tax cuts, to private growth. But, to get there we have to achieve a higher level of growth that triggers the confidence. So, I personally believe this is a good deal, and the best he [Obama] could have gotten under the circumstances.”
“We had an election [Nov. 2010]. The results are what they are. The numbers will only get worse in January in terms of negotiating. And the president [Obama], look if we had five percent growth and unemployment was dropping like a rock, maybe you could have the so-called Mexican Standoff and you could say, ‘it’ll be you, not me the voters will hold responsible for raising taxes on middle-class people if they [tax rate compromises] all go down, you know, next year. “ [my emphasis]
Stunning candor, or slick dissimulation intended to make Mr. Obama look bad?
In any case, where was Press Sec. ‘Gibbsy’ to run media interference for that outburst? Would he have even had the cojones to thwart president Clinton’s roll? Where was the media in calling for their President to duty instead of calling in pinch-hitter Clinton?
And where was Mr. Obama? He bailed on the crisis and presidential duties in order to attend a Christmas party, apparently because Michelle was nagging him on his telepromp … er, Blackberry to “get back here!” Or, something.
Sen. Sanders’ often H8-ful vitriol demonized his fellow Americans as “crybabies.” He divisively echoed co-president Clinton with countless Marxist straw men, including: “how much do the richest people in this country want? When is enough, enough? How much do they need?”
This much can be said of Sen. Sanders: he actually stood there, for eight-plus hours, spouting his radical ideology without hiding behind rhetorical devices, or his woman’s skirt.
“I think that we need to create a real crisis here so that the Republicans will have to answer for denying Americans unemployment benefits on the eve of the Christmas holiday.”
(Rahm Emmanuel, call your office)
Obviously, last November’s ballot-box shellacking has yet to fully arrest the Alinsky radicals — both realistic and rhetorical — and their counter-revolutionary, transformative Dreams of for the nation.
Clearly, Democrats and their comrades will never cease in their need to dehumanize and repress their fellow man in their utopian quest for collective salvation, the party purity they call social justice.
They will never stop their class-warfare against unnamed millionaire/billionaire “rich” people for their greedy treacheries, just as with Big Brother’s Emmanuel Goldstein.
The long war escalates as the Statists become increasingly trapped in their bankrupt creed.
Saddle up and settle in for the long war, regular Americans. Never tire of keeping up the good works in defense of Liberty and our miraculous Republic.
Let us fight the good fight, so that our beloved America is secured as the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.
On my Twitter account, I follow a few hundred mainstream media-types (keep the enemy closer, right?), and unless I've missed it (and I hope I have), not a single one has spoken out in defense of Roland Martin. Not one. How scary is that. The politically correct Groupthink...
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