Batter up!

But ol’ Charlie’s still got a way to go to top this one:

By comparison, here’s what a real first pitch looks like: (more…)

Pastry shops aren’t this delicious.

As the first of the “Tea Party” candidates to rock the boat and triumph over a moderate Republican, Marco Rubio became the MSM poster boy for the extremism that was purportedly going to KO any chance of the GOP doing well in November. According to those oh-so-concerned-for-Republicans voices in the media, the ideological purging on the Right would split votes and allow Democrats to emerge victorious.

The Republican infighting over Florida’s Senate seat that drove Gov. Charlie Crist to ditch the GOP is giving an underdog Democrat a realistic shot at pulling off an upset in the fall,” AP writes. “Democratic Rep. Kendrick Meek, who appeared headed to a lopsided loss in November, suddenly looks like a plausible contender to snatch away victory as Crist’s decision to run as an independent sets up a three-way race that could split Republicans between the governor and Republican favorite Marco Rubio.

Poor Dana Milbank was in such a state at the Washington Post that he did everything but beg for a hanky and a fan to help him through a case of the vapors.

But the Crist crisis is a whole new level of Jacobin excess; in the case of Lieberman, Democrats at least waited until he lost the primary to purge him.

Not so the Republicans, who are in a dogmatic race to the bottom as they drop Crist for his far-right challenger, Marco Rubio.

(more…)

Since President Obama’s elevation to Intergalactic Superstar Caesar in   November 2008, the media has been busy writing obituaries for the GOP. Most of these unwelcome mourners have offered nuggets of advice along the lines of, “Why don’t you try being more, you know, like us? More—what’s the term? Oh yes, more moderate. Conservatism is so last season.” The day after Obama’s  election, the Huffington Post gleefully announced “GOP Civil War Begins[!!!!!!]”

Being the tenderhearted folks they are, the liberal MSM diagnosed the real problem for us: “[I]f there’s a real crisis in the House right now for the Republican Party, it’s the gradually diminishing voice of moderation.” Over a year later, MSNBC was still going strong with the GOP civil war theme, warning that an ideological purity test “threatens to derail moderate Republican candidacies in heated 2010 Republican primaries already underway.”

Obviously, there have been and are ongoing arguments about the direction of conservatism and the Republican party. The 2008 election would’ve shaken the confidence of Alexander the Great, had he been a political candidate instead of a slaughtering conqueror. But the media is missing the real story again. The story now isn’t the demise of the GOP moderate. It’s the sudden downfall of last season’s debutante, the “moderate Democrat.” (more…)

One of the tricks that the Old Media consistently uses to paint conservatives as walking on the dark side is to call Republicans who lean left “moderates,” while those who lean to the right are “right wing” or “hardcore” Republicans. This media-speak reserves the harsher words for conservatives and makes anyone on the right seem like an extremist, yet paints the center-left as being on the side of the angels.

It’s a subtle flavoring of rhetoric that leads the reader to a prearranged conclusion as opposed to a reporting of the facts. A recent Time Magazine article by Tim Padgett on the Republican primary Senate campaign in Florida between the fading Gov. Charlie Crist and the surging former house speaker Marco Rubio is a perfect example.

To Time the primary fight between Rubio and Crist is apparently one of light versus dark, the evil extremist “right wing” siding with Rubio against the nice, “inclusive” moderates supporting Crist. But with this characterization, Time is misrepresenting the political battle between Rubio and Crist. Unfortunately for Time’s agenda, the argument in Florida between Rubio and Crist has little to do with moderates, inclusion, or big tent politics but has everything to do with economics. Rubio is a fiscal conservative while Crist, the incumbent governor, has been a profligate spender. (more…)