David Frum on CNN’s Reliable Sources: “People Who Watch A Lot Of Fox Come Away Knowing A Lot Less”

Media Matters touts the sensational headline above without a video link, embed, or download of the source material in any way. Not only is the quote inaccurate because it’s incomplete, but it likely stems from a weak survey first pushed by MMfA. They also neglect to inform their readers that Howard Kurtz called out Frum for his reckless statement in this very segment of “Reliable Sources.” This is how propaganda is made, thus making MMfA gulity of the very charge it dishonestly levels at Fox News.

NewsBusters has the complete video with a transcript. It’s also worth a closer look, as the “world events” could easily involve Egypt and Syria because of a previous survey also pushed by MMfA. In essence, Frum may have regurgitated some earlier MMfA propaganda, which they then recycled yet one more time, creating a disingenuous feedback loop purely to bash Fox News. More importantly, Frum was being just as critical of liberal outlets such as MMfA, and Kurtz admits that media outlets are, indeed, biased toward the left. Media Matters simply omitted that, as it isn’t what they wanted their readers to know. (more…)

Jon Huntsman’s presidential announcment was met with resounding approval from those who wish to see four more years of the Obama Administration.  Among the rest of America, the reaction ranged from ennui to observations like “It’s good to see the Cryptkeeper getting work again.”   Regardless, Huntsman’s candidacy fuels some of the most intense liberal fantasies outside of Anthony Wiener’s hard drive.

For the liberals and the MSM – as if the two were different – Huntsman represents the ultimate in a win-win GOP candidate.  They win because head-to-head against Obama, Huntsman would get pummeled like a handicapped Tea Partier at a SEIU anti-violence rally.  And, in the off-chance some unlikely event takes place that allows Huntsman to beat Obama – like a surprise unicorn invasion or a sudden onset of accurate and complete reporting by the MSM – the GOP still loses.  The only thing worse than Obama implementing neo-socialist economic policies, spending like an alcoholic lottery winner, providing amnesty to every illegal north of the Rio Grande and buying into the global warming scam is having a nominal Republican do those things.

The very worst case scenario for the MSM is that ex-Utah governor Huntsman still provides it with a ready, willing and able yardstick of sober rectitude and utter supine submission by which to measure – and find wanting – the Republican candidates with the stones to actually fight for conservative principles.  His schoolmarm presidential announcement was really just a lecture directed at the American people – in particular, the ones upset about the destruction of our traditions and our future – instructing them not to get uppity, to be “respectful” to those who disrespect them, and to accept that we are morally obligated to ignore the evidence before our eyes that our opponents intend to fundamentally alter our country for the worst.  Pretty presumptuous for a guy who Don Quixote would assess as having no chance in hell.

To Huntsman and his squishy ilk, we’re the problem.  Our role is to come out and vote for the pseudo-conservatives, then to sit down, shut up and take what we are spoonfed by our D.C. betters.  And the MSM rewards this attitude by bestowing upon these fifth columnists the proverbial “strange new respect” that distinguishes a Republican who has accepted leftist dhimmitude.

On that note, has anyone seen a negative story about Boehner since he started golfing with the One and flailing helplessly before the liberal onslaught?  The countdown has begun to a WaPo headline reading “Speaker Boehner Soberly Tries To Balances Duty To America Versus Unreasonable Demands of Hate-Filled GOP Right-Wing Fringe Lunatics.”

Huntsman simply represents the latest in the sorry line of domesticated Republican pushovers embraced by the MSM as long as they acquiesce to certain failure.  On the journalism side we have conservanerds David Brooks and David Frum.  On the political side, you had Bob Bennett and you have Orrin Hatch – what the hell is it with Utah anyway?   Hatch has reinvented himself as Tea Partier and is tapdancing like Gregory Hines on meth to escape accusations of accommodationism that could put him out of his job and on the whining-about-how-the-GOP-left-me express with his pal Bobby.

John McCain found out just how much the love and respect of the MSM is worth during his run – while the vice-presidency may be worth a bucket of warm spit, MSM favor for a Republican is worth that less the bucket.  The second he secured the nomination it was open season, and the effort redoubled when he dare blow minds with his one move that was both truly maverick and truly not idiotic – picking Sarah Palin.

So it’s not fair to compare Jon to John – Huntsman doesn’t have it in him to pick a true conservative veep nominee and he doesn’t have the sterling war record that, regardless of our disagreements with his policies and maverick antics, has earned McCain the sincere respect and thanks of conservatives (Hugh Hewitt calls him“a great American, a lousy senator and a terrible Republican”).

On the plus side, there’s no indication that Huntsman has an obnoxious daughter who is as publicly chatty as she is publicly embarrassing.

Huntsman’s role is not to win the nomination – he’s the only person on earth who actually believes he can do that and it’s even doubtful he’s that dumb.  Huntsman’s role is to be the boring, ineffective moderate that the MSM can use to unfavorably compare to the real conservatives.  Every time he is crushed by GOP primary voters it will be cited as undisputable evidence that the Republican party has veered off into a netherworld of primordial rightwingery that no sane person could possibly want any part of.  His eventual defeat will be the final piece of evidence convicting the GOP of crimes against the mainstream.  Can you trust a party so unwise as to reject Jon Huntsman?  Mark this – I’ve got $5 that says that, stung by his forthcoming rejection, we will see Jon Huntsman sadly inform the MSM that he must reluctantly support President Obama because whoever gets the GOP nomination is “just too extreme” during a time when “we need to be united, not divided.”  Of course, by then inflation will make that $5 worth $2.

The promotion of Huntsman is like the condescending whisper of a sanctimonious unionized schoolteacher telling you to “use your inside voice.”  But the last thing the GOP needs now is the voice of the party to be muted, quiet and inoffensive.  Which is exactly why the MSM wants so very badly for Jon Huntsman to be that voice.

In the end there is no question about Huntsman’s natural constituency among Republicans.  It’s the guys who feel that we, as the GOP, are honor-bound to lose at all costs.  And the MSM is going to aid and abet them right up until the moment that Huntsman actually – through a miracle of such magnitude it would convince Christopher Hitchens to leap into a confessional and beg forgiveness from the Almighty – appears to be a threat to a second Obama term.

There is a misconception that the mainstream media hates all conservatives.  That’s just not true.  The MSM loves some conservatives – the ones who combine a willingness to stick their conservative brothers and sisters in the back with a stereotypical, tweedy doofusism that ensures absolutely no one would ever want to be one of them.  Their poster children are David Brooks and David Frum.  Call them the Conservanerds.

Conservanerds aren’t hard to identify. You can tell one by listening to him for about 15 seconds, by which time you will be overcome by a desire to either slap him or take his lunch money.  You can find them dwelling at the fringes of liberal culture – they are allowed to attend the cocktail parties as the token conservative, tolerated by their masters in return for passive obedience and the occasional swipe at Sarah Palin and her intolerable uppityness.

If they were simply annoying, that would be one thing, but the problem is that the MSM loves to present them as the true face of conservatism, a face that is reasonable and harmless and that always – always – loses out to the liberals.  Conservanerds play up to the awful stereotype of the bookish, passive-aggressive “traditional” conservative with a disdain for popular culture and, critically, for the other 95% of modern conservatives out there today.

Tea Party folks?  Heaven forbid – those simply are not our kind of people.   Those vulgar Tea Partyiers enjoy NASCAR and beer and guns and some actually believe in God.  Many of them work with their hands, and most of them didn’t even go to Harvard!

Sure, there’s class at play – it goes without saying the Conservanerds feel more at home with an Ivy League Hillary Clinton than a Middle-American Sarah Palin – but it’s also MSM wish fulfillment.  Liberals love the idea of conservatives who pose no threat at all, who are happy to take the scraps from the MSM’s table just as long as they get invited to the dinner party.

This is not a new phenomenon.  Starting with Goldwater and up through the Reagan years, a bunch of new folks flooded into the Conservative movement, folks that were less William F. Buckley and more John Wayne – or even Johnny Rotten.  The old line conservatives, the tweed-wearing country club types, found it quite a culture shock.  During college in the 80’s, half the staff assembling the California Review, UCSD’s right-wing paper, would be trying to appreciate to some Respighi concerto while the rest of us would be cranking the Ramones and swilling Coors.

It turned out that the party Republicans won.

The real conservative today is aggressive, outspoken and (worst of all for the Conservanerds) cares nothing for the approval of the elite.  That makes us anathema.  No wonder they are so eager to pounce – we’ve committed the sin of not caring what they think.  Whether you’re a tee-totaling Georgia Evangelical, a concerned mama grizzly from Kansas or a beer-swilling LA cavalryman with a four letter vocabulary and the Sex Pistols on his CD player, we’re the new face of conservatism.  And it’s driving the Conservanerds bonkers.

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Publisher David Frum’s pettiness knows no bounds.  Earlier today he falsely accused Andrew Breitbart of having sought out an invitation to a party at his house:

Breitbart emphatically denied having “sought” an invitation to the party, which was for Roger L. Simon’s book,  Blacklisting Myself. Over at Simon’s Pajamas Media, Simon went on record supporting Breitbart:

So, according to the guest of honor of the aforementioned party, Breitbart was invited not once, but twice.  Yet, despite the overwhelming evidence, Frum has yet to formerly retract the bogus (and alarmingly trivial) charge against Breitbart.  We respectfully ask that he do so post haste.

Additionally, it should be noted that Frum’s wife, Danielle Crittenden, is piling on Breitbart, first by calling him a sinner and then by chastising the BigJournalism publisher, who is Jewish, by saying “I bet you’re super tight with Mel Gibson”: (more…)

Newt Gingrich stirred up a big of a controversy Friday night just by commenting on an article in Forbes Magazine by Dinesh D’Souza. The premise of the article is many of Obama’s positions were influenced by his dad.

What then is Obama’s dream? We don’t have to speculate because the President tells us himself in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father. According to Obama, his dream is his father’s dream. Notice that his title is not Dreams of My Father but rather Dreams from My Father. Obama isn’t writing about his father’s dreams; he is writing about the dreams he received from his father.

Whether you agree with it or not this is not a terribly, outlandish position, many of us can say that we were influenced by our father’s dreams. I certainly carried many of my father’s dreams into the next generation. Gingrich felt the D’Souza article was incredibly insightful.

Citing a recent Forbes article by Dinesh D’Souza, former House speaker Newt Gingrich tells National Review Online that President Obama may follow a “Kenyan, anti-colonial” worldview.

Gingrich says that D’Souza has made a “stunning insight” into Obama’s behavior — the “most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama.”

“What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?” Gingrich asks. “That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.”

According to David Frum, Newt Gingrich’s comments were made to promote the “birther” nonsense that says Barack Obama was not born in the U.S., and D’Souza’s article was written for “race-baiting” purposes: (more…)

Writing at Politico, Keach Hagey tries to sum up one possible lesson of Dave Weigel’s recent firing from the Washington Post. Hagey’s argument is that, in the new media environment, public disgrace may actually be good for your career. To bolster her point she offers several examples:

Or how about Christopher Buckley? … Buckley wrote a column for National Review until he wrote a piece for the Daily Beast titled, “Sorry, Dad, I’m Voting For Obama.”  Soon after the piece was published National Review received a flurry of criticism and Buckley was forced out as damage control. Buckley continued writing books and at the Daily Beast, his credentials, with liberals at least, greatly enhanced.

David Frum provides one of the most recent examples…During the healthcare reform debates, he wrote a post called “Waterloo” in which he criticized the Republican Party’s obstruction of passing a healthcare bill. The post garnered a lot of criticism from the right and soon after “Waterloo,” AEI fired Frum. Since then, FrumForum’s traffic has continued to grow and the site has increasingly become one of the primary destinations for conservative news and analysis.

David Frum

What do all these individuals have in common with one another and with Dave Weigel? They all moved very publicly to the left. (more…)

Bow-wow. You can call me Bo. I’m President Shoutout’s family mutt, a Portuguese water dog with curly black hair. My real name isn’t Bo, but I’m not telling you my real one. Bo is fine. It’ll do anyway. Took the White House brain trust four months to come up with it — you wouldn’t believe the names they actually considered. Let’s just say that “Alinsky” was a contender until Axelrod said “why don’t you just name it ‘Arafat’ and kiss off flyover country for 2012?” Yeah, he called me “it.” Axelrod’s a real sweetheart. Barry’s chief political advisor, which means he spent the whole presidential campaign sending candygrams to the press corps so they wouldn’t do their job. He could have accomplished the same thing with a Hershey bar stolen from an orphan’s Halloween bag. I got his number. Axelrod smells like cabbage and tries to kick me when Barry’s not looking.

Right now, I’m sitting in the Oval Office with Barry, Axelrod and Chief of Staff and resident kneecapper, Rahm Emanuel, while the three chumps cool their heels in the waiting room. Barry’s staring out the window, going JFK on us, trying to figure out which precise upward angle of the chin registers that weary-but-resolute toughness that the press corps laps up. If he sticks that jaw up any higher he’s going to drown in a drizzle if you ask me, but the pose does seem to bring a flush to the freshly sculpted cheeks of Andrea Mitchell. (more…)