Radio talker Rush Limbaugh got in dutch with Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer for saying that Obama supporters were “slobbering” over his address at the pep rally/memorial sponsored by the University of Arizona for those fallen in the Arizona shooting. But “slobbering” is nothing compared to historian Douglas Brinkley’s hyperbolic praise. Brinkley absurdly said that Obama was “Martin Luther King-like” in his efforts.

Brinkley’s blinkered assessment was originally reported by CNN’s Kristi Keck immediately after the speech. His comments were coupled with those of several other commentators and published under the headline, “Obama’s Tucson speech: Inspirational, but tone surprised some.” Brinkley made himself look simply silly with his comments.

“I thought President Obama did a wonderful job this evening. I thought that he really brought people together. I mean, when he, in the middle of the speech, said, ‘Gabby opened her eyes, Gabby opened her eyes,’ & you could almost hear a Martin Luther King-like inflection — And he carried that throughout a lot of the speech.

“I was, like David Gergen earlier, a little put off by the atmospherics, 14,000 cheering people. But the president, I think, worked his way into that atmosphere. So, by the end of it, you could almost feel people hugging in the excitement, in the warmth & the love in the arena.”

There is little doubt that the atmosphere of this memorial cum pep rally was nearly as bad as that of the Wellstone funeral of 2002. The University of Arizona set the tone badly right at the beginning by treating the whole thing like an Obama campaign appearance. U of A President Richard Shelton’s introduction of Obama, for instance, was wholly inappropriate for a memorial.

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I should explain again as I do every week to the viewers as a kind of a viewer’s guide that this is the weekly Sarah Palin segment in which the impression is given that the whole of conservatism in America is encapsulated in this one glorious woman?

[...]

I think in the liberal imagination she is and will always be the only representative of conservatism of any importance.

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The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne has just given us a new line of attack on the Tea Party: now the movement is just a giant scam out to hoodwink the American public.

Is the tea party one of the most successful scams in American political history?… the tea party constitutes a sliver of opinion on the extreme end of politics receiving attention out of all proportion with its numbers. …The tea party may be pulling a fast one on the country and the media.

The only one trying to pull a fast one here is Dionne—who’s playing fast and loose with the facts. More about that shortly.  But first, a question: “What makes a liberal deny reality?” There can be only two answers.

Either the liberal is so blinded by ideology that he simply cannot see the truth, or the liberal’s unwillingness to recognize painful reality compels him to try to minimize it. Paul Krugman falls into the first category.  A Keynesian crackhead from his salad days, Krugman believes the first stimulus was too small.

Dionne falls into the second. He can’t accept the inescapable truth that the Tea Party is here to stay. And so, Dionne does what most ideologically strait-jacketed liberals do: he minimizes. By the way, throughout his article, note how Dionne intentionally spells the movement in lower case (“tea party”), literally diminishing the group by not granting it upper case status. In comparison,“Republican” and “Democrat” get full capital letter respect in Dionne’s piece. Anyway, here’s E.J.’s  “proof” that the Tea Party is fringe. (more…)

Yesterday, Newsbusters ran a story with this headline:

WaPo Finally Runs Story on NASA Administrator Bolden: Eight Paragraphs On Page A13

From the article:

In a June 30 interview with “Talk to Al Jazeera,” NASA administrator Charles Bolden revealed that President Obama had tasked him with “find[ing] a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.”

The media largely ignored the story, with a few exceptions, such as Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer.

Among the media outlets that blacked out the controversy was the Washington Post, which didn’t cover the Bolden controversy until today. Even then, the paper printed on page A13 a brief 8-paragraph item by the Reuters news wire:

This information alone is enough to make you want get a new subscription to the Washington Post just so you can have the satisfaction of canceling it, but it gets worse… and worser.

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Marc Ambinder poses this question in his April 23 article in The Atlantic : “Have Conservatives Gone Mad? “

Ambinder lays blithe and, according to no less a source than himself, undeniable claim to the liberal journalism’s monopoly on political veritas, identifying “the most trenchant and effective criticism of President Obama” coming “not from the right, but the left.” On the other hand, he asserts, “mainstream conservative voices are embracing theories that are, to use Julian Sanchez’s phrase, ‘untethered’ to the real world.”

Before examining that assertion, let’s list a few more of Ambinder’s pronouncements about the journalistic right.

The base itself seems to have developed a notion that bromides are equivalent to policy-thinking, and that therapy is a substitute for thinking. It is absolutely a condition of the age of the triumph of conservative personality politics, where entertainers shouting slogans are taken seriously as political actors.

Well, thank goodness he laid that to rest. Q.E.D. Still, if therapy really is a substitute for thinking, Ambinder should consider changing his surname to Freud. (more…)

Two years ago today, William F. Buckley moved on to the great Firing Line in the Sky where he is, no doubt, still debating the wisdom of turning over the Panama Canal with the Gipper. Buckley’s legacy lives on, not only in the remarkable generation of writers that he spawned after he first dared to stand athwart history and yell stop but, in an odd sort of way, in the manner in which some of the liberals he defied over the course of five decades seem to pine for the great man’s genteel ways.

On a personal note, Buckley was one of the two great influences in the creative life of this particular – not particularly humble – correspondent. The other was that irascible Chicago newspaperman/Everyman: Mike Royko. It’s difficult to imagine an odder couple, but Buckley and Royko shared at least a couple of common characteristics. One took them on at one’s peril (and very few ever successfully did so) and neither could be neatly constrained within an ideological box. Royko was classically liberal, but he openly scorned the liberal elite. Buckley became the symbol of the conservative movement, but he refused to let the movement define him, cutting his own path through the ideological jungle when necessary, most famously when he argued for the legalization of many illegal drugs. Agree or disagree, both Royko and Buckley were thinkers, and honest thinkers to boot, who had a knack for expressing their thoughts with the kind of panache that left their readers breathless in awe. (more…)