For intellectual laziness, lackluster writing and sheer historical dishonesty, it’s hard to beat Frank Rich of the New York Times.  Week after week, and at tiresome length, Rich dishes out his regurgitated pensées regarding his pet hobby-horses, including the evil Bush Administration, gay rights, and the fact that, sooner or later, the Christian Right is going to get your mama.  In every way except the physical courage to actually be on the scene, Rich is a worthy successor to the Times’s disgraceful Stalinist apparatchik, Walter Duranty, whose tainted Pulitzer the Times has yet to return.

On Saturday, the undistinguished former drama critic, show-business wannabe and non-bestselling author — who unnaccountably occupies some of the most prime editorial real estate in the world — outdid himself with this eminently predictable yet nonetheless embarrassing and ludicrous piece of revisionism/wishful thinking: “The Axis of the Obsessed and the Deranged.” Lest you jump to a perfectly rational conclusion and think this is about the editorial board of the Times, think again:

No one knows what history will make of the present — least of all journalists, who can at best write history’s sloppy first draft. But if I were to place an incautious bet on which political event will prove the most significant of February 2010, I wouldn’t choose the kabuki health care summit that generated all the ink and 24/7 cable chatter in Washington. I’d put my money instead on the murder-suicide of Andrew Joseph Stack III, the tax protester who flew a plane into an office building housing Internal Revenue Service employees in Austin, Tex., on Feb. 18. It was a flare with the dark afterlife of an omen. (more…)

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann broke from his self-described pattern of not offering commentary, and called for an end to the media’s self-imposed editorial silence concerning the U.S. government’s response to a terrible natural disaster.

Okay, it was a different disaster during a different administration. But did you hear what he said? A week into the Hurricane Katrina recovery he declared that,

But now, at last, it has stopped getting exponentially worse…and having given our leaders what we now know is the week or so they need to get their acts together, that period of editorial silence I mentioned should come to an end.

As the chaos of recovery efforts in and around New Orleans became the big story, old media commentators fired barrages of harsh rhetoric toward President Bush and members of his administration directly involved with disaster relief. Never mind what part of that criticism was justified, and what part was driven by political preferences. It was a blend. (more…)

For long-suffering conservatives, Christmas arrived about a month late this year.  But considering all the presents we got this week, it was like coming downstairs and finding the Budweiser Clydesdales under the tree, instead of that crummy used Radio Flyer your dad managed to find on eBay for twenty bucks.

First, on Tuesday, there was the Massachusetts Miracle, in which an obscure state senator named Scott Brown came out of nowhere — okay, Wrentham — to defeat a lackluster and morally dubious Democrat machine party hack who had expected to slow-walk herself, with David Gergen’s blessing, into “Teddy Kennedy’s seat.”  But the Bay State voters had other ideas for the “Massachusette” –

Brown ran hard on the selling point that he would be the 41st vote in the Senate against Harry Reid’s and Nancy Pelosi’s screwball tax-and-wreck “health care” plan, a Rube Goldbergian contraption that would have made Elbridge Gerry weep with envy at all its cut-outs, set-asides, bribes and special-interest stroking.  He also campaigned on the notion that taxpayer dollars would be better spent fighting terrorists instead of paying for lawyers for them.  So, naturally, the first questions he got yesterday from the press corps in Washington were all along the lines of: “You’re not really a Republican, are you?”

To which the Democrats, caught flat-footed as usual, basically reacted like this: (more…)

There are many things on the World Wide Web that are not suitable for public viewing but that should be required viewing for journalists and political figures to alert them to the horrors that exist in some parts of the world. This should not be to incite but rather to rinse away their naïveté in dealing with a hostile culture and our potential enemies.

It is apparent that the mainstream media has no interest in covering stories that shed an unfavorable side of Islam and, frankly, this smacks of cowardice.

The elite will instead claim that the “vast majority” of Muslims are peace-loving and are just as horrified at the acts of a small number of radical terrorists.  That may very well be true but even a fraction of a billion is a very large number and that number is growing and gaining influence around the world thanks to the stupidity and cowardice of what should be called the “lamestream” press and those in our government today.

The Internet bloggers are doing the nasty job of covering the world of Islamic jihadists and it is truly chilling. The video of Daniel Pearl’s beheading could not be shown on the public airwaves but was easily available on the web. Gruesome as it was it cannot compare with this video of children training for Jihad beheading a man all the while praising Allah. (more…)