Last month, Sen. Rick Santorum schooled CNN’s Candy Crowley on the subject of President Barack Obama’s appeasement of America’s enemies.

Today, on NBC’s Meet the Press, it was David Gregory’s turn.

Like Crowley, Gregory attempted to “fact-check” Santorum by arguing that it could not possibly be “accurate” or “objective” to describe Obama’s foreign policy as “appeasement.”

In particular, he challenged Santorum to distinguish Obama’s policy on Iran from that of his predecessor, George W. Bush. (For several years, Democrats have tried to defend Obama by pointing out that the Bush administration refused to approve military strikes, either by the U.S. or by Israel.)

Santorum, as usual, delivered the facts on demand:

Santorum pointed out that Obama failed to support Iran’s democracy movement–and later added that Obama cut funding to pro-democracy programs that Bush had supported. He noted that Obama has given tacit support to Islamist political parties in Egypt and other Arab countries that oppose America and our allies. (more…)

The Washington Post, in an apparent effort to embellish President Barack Obama’s national security credentials, has given him credit for accelerating the military’s highly successful drone program in an article entitled, “Under Obama, an emerging global apparatus for drone killing.”

President-elect Obama greets eager Washington Post fans (Jan. 2009)

That headline is impressive to all but the most die-hard anti-war activists (mostly quiescent under a Democratic president). The conclusion the Post evidently wishes readers to draw is that Obama has been a tough, courageous, and uniquely successful commander-in-chief.

The article begins:

The Obama administration’s counterterrorism accomplishments are most apparent in what it has been able to dismantle, including CIA prisons and entire tiers of al-Qaeda’s leadership. But what the administration has assembled, hidden from public view, may be equally consequential.

In the space of three years, the administration has built an extensive apparatus for using drones to carry out targeted killings of suspected terrorists and stealth surveillance of other adversaries. The apparatus involves dozens of secret facilities, including two operational hubs on the East Coast, virtual Air Force­ ­cockpits in the Southwest and clandestine bases in at least six countries on two continents…

With a year to go in President Obama’s first term, his administration can point to undeniable results: Osama bin Laden is dead, the core al-Qaeda network is near defeat, and members of its regional affiliates scan the sky for metallic glints.

But the drone program did not begin on January 20, 2009–even if mainstream media squeamishness about it ended on the day. The most important elements of the program began under Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush–a fact buried deep into the article:

Inside the White House, according to officials who would discuss the drone program only on the condition of anonymity, the drone is seen as a critical tool whose evolution was accelerating even before Obama was elected.

What is new is that Obama reversed himself and embraced the idea that terrorists could be killed abroad in what the left used to described as “extrajudicial killings,” partly because of Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder’s ideological hostility to terrorist detention. (more…)

The formidable Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal notes a glaring (im)moral equivalence in the New York Times’s obituary for Kim Jong-Il:

The real mystery is why, in free societies where few journalists and politicians are ever at serious risk of reprisal, truth-telling seems to be in relatively short supply. North Korea is a vast modern-day Auschwitz. Yet when George W. Bush named Pyongyang to the Axis of Evil, it was Mr. Bush who was roundly mocked. Note the balance of contempt in the New York Times’ write-up of Kim’s death from Sunday night:

“President George W. Bush called [Kim] a ‘pygmy.’ . . . Yet those who met him were surprised by his serious demeanor and his knowledge of events beyond the hermit kingdom he controlled.” O, misunderstood Dear Leader, if only we had known you better.

On November 16, Alec Baldwin had a column in the Huffington Post titled, “What Occupy Wall Street Has Taught Me.” In it, the actor who promised to leave the United States if George W. Bush were re-elected in 2004 reminds us not only that he’s still here, but that he is still as arrogant and illogical as ever.

For example, throughout the column Baldwin talks about the struggles faced by people who are unemployed.  And although he doesn’t explicitly say it’s not their fault that they’re unemployed—as it clearly is in some cases—he implies as much when complains that those of us who are gainfully employed seem to believe “that we are not responsible in any way” for those who aren’t.

In other words, it’s not their fault that their unemployed. Rather, it’s the fault of the corporations, of Wall Street, and of big oil. (In case these points seem little more than restatements of what the hippies and freaks of #OccupyWallStreet have been saying, Baldwin admits: “Everything I have put forth here, I have heard articulated from the Occupy Wall Street movement.”)

By the way, according to Baldwin, our bailouts to big oil weren’t always monetary in nature. Rather, “[we] bailed out the oil companies every time you watched … as American troops went to Iraq to fight a war for oil.”

As an aside, I can’t figure out why leftists like Baldwin keep spewing this trash. If we fought in Iraq for oil, where’s the oil? Why are our gas prices rising instead of falling? Don’t get me wrong, I think oil would be a great way for Iraq to repay us for getting rid of Saddam Hussein, but thus far, none has been forthcoming.

The further you read into Baldwin’s column, the more random things get. For instance, at one point he blames our economic woes on the fact that “we have no high speed rail in this country.” The last time he said something this random was in a September column, when he blamed our current economy on the fact that we spent the Bush years fighting “a trillion dollars worth of wars with no tax hikes.”

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Let’s give Mr. Alter some props. He answered my email. Granted, it took awhile but he did respond. Here’s his response. It’s not bad until the end. You’ll see what I mean.

Hi, Mary:
Yes, I would tell you and Brian Terry’s family that Operation Fast and Furious was not a scandal. It was bad public policy that went horribly awry, with tragic consequences. It was a big blunder, a fiasco and maybe some other adjectives you and I could agree on, but not a “scandal” as conventionally defined. If you believe it’s a scandal, which to my mind connotes intentional wrongdoing for financial or personal (sometimes sexual gain), than you must include other huge policy mistakes under your definition.

So I assume you are willing to agree that the Bush Administration’s failure to recognize in advance that Saddam Hussein didn’t possess WMD was a scandal (removing Saddam’s WMD was the explicitly-stated purpose of the war). That intelligence failure led to an unnecessary war and the death of thousands. Many veterans of the Bush Administration have agreed that the war, like Operation Fast and Furious, was a case of good intentions gone horribly wrong.”Stuff happens,” as Donald Rumsfeld put it.

But those unfortunate, even tragic, things are not the stuff of scandal, unless they involved stealing by contractors and the like. As it happens, I was a supporter of the war initially, then criticized its conduct. But knowing that President Bush genuinely believed WMD to be present (In the same way Eric Holder genuinely believed the U. S. government could track guns through that straw purchase program, which had begun under Bush), I never called the Iraq War a scandal. Did you?  I didn’t think so.

If you are motivated by anything beyond sheer malice toward the President of the United States you will agree with the logic of this post. In any event, please feel free to share it with your readers.

Warm regards, Jonathan Alter

I thought it was an okay response until the last part and he shot himself in the foot. If my supposed “sheer malice” for President Obama is blinding me then couldn’t I say Mr. Alter’s total devotion to President Obama is blinding him?

To Mr. Alter a scandal is intentional wrongdoing for financial or personal gain. The Department of Justice didn’t tell the Mexican government about Operation Fast & Furious. Could someone please explain to me how that doesn’t count as intentional wrongdoing? How does anyone think it’s right or a good thing to arm already dangerous drug cartels? How were they going to track the guns without anyone knowing on the other side or tracking devices in the guns?! No attempt was made at the border to confiscate the guns. The DOJ purposely did not tell the Mexican government. They didn’t inform the Mexican government because they wanted this operation fail. Operation Fast & Furious was doomed from the beginning. Eric Holder never believed they could track guns through the straw purchase program. If he did there would be tracking devices in the guns and the Mexican government would be involved. If you think about it the only way for the guns to be tracked would be to find them at crime scenes.

Another reason why Operation Fast & Furious is a scandal under Mr. Alter’s definition: the push for gun control laws. Let’s just say everything Mr. Alter and Mr. Holder has said is 100% true. It’s still a scandal because now the DOJ and some in Congress are using Operation Fast & Furious as a way to push for more gun control. They’re using this situation for personal and political gains. The New York Times concentrated on that one part of Mr. Holder’s testimony!

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I need to thank my friend Sean Arther for bringing this to my attention on Twitter. (Thank you!) He read my article on Dana Milbank, an op-ed columnist for The Washington Post, who claims Operation Fast and Furious is not a scandal. He remembered the intense media coverage in November 2000 when someone leaked George Bush’s 1976 DUI arrest. The media coverage was so intense that the LA Times ran an article about the coverage. One part caught my eye. [bold my emphasis]

Only a few major dailies–among them the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun and the Dallas Morning News–considered it front-page news. Others, such as the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, mentioned the arrest on Page One but ran a full story inside.

Editors at the Washington Post initially decided to keep the story inside. But they changed course as the story gathered steam during the night on the news wires.

“In the end, after a lot of discussion back and forth, . . . I decided that this was front-page news pure and simple,” said Executive Editor Leonard Downie. Bush’s acknowledgment that he had withheld the information, Downie said, “struck me as a newsworthy decision, to not disclose this when there was a long-standing issue about his personal conduct in the past.“

Interesting! Let me see if I have this right. A DUI arrest from 1976 deserves the front page. A federal funded operation that has resulted in the death of hundreds, including federal agents, does not deserve the front page.

Wait, what? I don’t see the logic. (more…)

As we’ve highlighted before, tax exempt Media Matters’ mission isn’t to correct misinformation in the conservative media. Their job is to promote narratives which will then be picked up by friendly outlets, like MSNBC, and seep out into the public consciousness. Their real purpose is to act as guardians at the gates of the Left’s ideological iron curtain and keep progressives from thinking for themselves. When you couple this narrative-shaping with the “mainstream” media’s ingrained left-leaning bias, you get, for example, polls showing the level of misinformation in the general public.

A recent NBC/WSJ poll (pdf) provides a classic example of how the left-leaning media takes a poll and uses it to shape and promote a narrative. Note first that this poll is a general opinion poll measuring public sentiment on a broad range of issues related to politics and the economy. Keep in mind that the Left has been in full damage control for the Occupy movement because a) Democrats have voiced support of it and b) the violence, vandalism, drug overdoses and reports of sexual assaults/rapes are beginning to get bad coverage – finally. The spin doctors are desperate for anything that can lend legitimacy to a solidly Leftist movement which is spiraling into chaos.

The Washington Post’s resident DNC talking point parrot (I know there are several), Greg Sargent, cites some findings of the new poll. The poll results are 27 pages long, but Sargent cherry-picks the stuff that can be spun into “positive” news for Occupy Wall Street.

A new NBC/WSJ poll finds very broad support for Occupy Wall Street’s critique of inequality, with more than three quarters agreeing with this statement: “The current economic structure of the country is out of balance and favors a very small proportion of the rich over the rest of the country. America needs to reduce the power of major banks and corporations and demand greater accountability and transparency. The government should not provide financial aid to corporations and should not provide tax breaks to the rich.” Eighty-four percent of working class whites agree with that statement, too.

To his credit, Sargent also notes that the poll finds a majority of the people are against raising taxes on anyone, but he questions the wording of that particular question. So he only gets half-credit because he didn’t question the wording of another finding that I’ll address in a bit. Actually make that 1/4 credit because he claims the critique in question is an “Occupy Wall Street” thing when this sentiment is shared by the Tea Party which has obviously been around longer. To sum it up, 53% either strongly agreed or mildly agreed with this statement:

The national debt must be cut significantly by reducing spending and the size of government, including eliminating some federal agencies and programs. Regulations on business by the federal government should be reduced and instead, the private sector and individuals should have greater control. The government should not raise taxes on anyone.

Sargent makes you go and look for this part of the poll. Chances are most people won’t. Let’s move on.

Greg Mitchell from the conservative bastion (that’s sarcasm), The Nation, picks up the cues from Sargent and tries to milk the poll to provide some much needed image nourishment to the Occupy Wall Street movement he’s been blogging – read cheerleading – about. Linking to Sargent, he writes:

7:00  Wash Post:  New NBC/WSJ poll–84% pf working-class whites say rich unfairly get breaks,  and also need more control of corporations… 71% say Obama did not go far enough in regulating banks….

Then, after scouring the poll results he does some more Occupy Wall Street cheerleading / tea party bashing:

7:20  More from new NBC/WSJ poll just out:  Occupy gets 32% positive number, 35% negative,  Tea Party 27% positive, 44% negative….  Occupy also “wins” in another question, with 25% saying it is a “good thing” for the country with 16% saying no, while Tea Party gets 31% good thing and 27% bad…. Finally 28% call themselves supporters of Occupy, with 25% backing Tea Party.  Also:  70% blame Bush and bankers for economic woes, only 21% name Obama…. 71% back total Iraq pullout…. and despite focus on jobs job jobs, concerns about health still nudge it as prime concern for most,  by 33% to 32%.

Notice how he doesn’t address the finding showing that a majority don’t think we should raise taxes on anyone – a core Occupy Wall Street demand. It doesn’t fit the narrative. The Occupy movement has “wins” he wants to highlight and The Nation readers are predisposed to Leftist “wins.” They won’t bother looking much further. The narrative is strengthened: “Hey! Did you hear about that poll showing OWS is winning?” So now, within the Leftist echo-chamber, the word is that recent polling is good for Occupy Wall Street and most have no idea that a central policy position isn’t “winning.”

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Crony Capitalism: Business depends on the relationships between their people and government officials.

Isn’t this fun: Finding a scandal in the Bush Administration that’s similar to a scandal in the Obama Administration and comparing how the MSM treated both. Like General Attorney Alberto Gonzalez, the MSM couldn’t get enough of any scandal within Halliburton and always made sure to connect them to Dick Cheney. Yet they don’t seem to care much about the wasted tax money on Solyndra.

The MSM did their job correctly by keeping us up to date with the wrong doings of Halliburton. They weren’t perfect and received some perks because of their ties to Vice President Dick Cheney. The fact is everything Halliburton did wrong the MSM was right there to pick it up, most notably the bribes paid to Nigeria. Bunnatine H. Greenhouse was demoted after she testified Halliburton was receiving special treatment for work in Iraq & Dick Cheney’s office was in complete control of Halliburton’s $7 billion Iraqi oil/infrastructure contract.

Was it crony capitalism? Yes. Government and government officials shouldn’t play favorites with private companies. The MSM was right to call out these Halliburton misfortunes.

Yet, until recently, the MSM outlets have been silent on Solyndra. In March 2009 Obama Administration gave Solyndra a $535 million loan guarantee. They were given this much money because of these promises:

• The construction of this complex will employ approximately 3,000 people.
• The operation of the facility will create over 1,000 jobs in the United States.
• The installation of these panels will create hundreds of additional jobs in the United States.
• The commercialization of this technology is expected to then be duplicated in multiple other manufacturing facilities

Yeah none of that happened. Here’s where it gets interesting & why the MSM should be all over this because it’s basically Halliburton/Cheney all over again. George Kaiser, one of the principal owners of Solyndra, is a HUGE Obama donator. Maybe this is why the loan was approved before officials completed mandated evaluations of the company? Turns out 143 companies wanted the loan, but Solyndra received it. Did it have anything to do with their $1.8 million in lobbying? But when Tim Harris, CEO of Solopower, didn’t think about lobbying because he was told it was not helpful or acceptable. Huh. So one company was told it wasn’t acceptable to lobby and yet the company, which one of the principal owners is a big Obama donator, was allowed to lobby & received the bigger loan. Thank goodness we didn’t loan more to Solyndra.

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In the same way he tried to capitalize on the horrific Tucson shooting as an excuse to attack Sarah Palin and conservatives, Paul Krugman has used his New York Times blog to attack Rudy Giuliani and President George W. Bush this morning in a most disgusting way:

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. Te (sic) atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

There is nothing wrong with reflecting on the events of ten years ago and making social and political judgements on our leaders’ reactions over the past decade.  In fact, most of us here at “The Bigs” have done so this morning at Big Government.

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In the ignoble quisling tradition of “Hanoi Jane,” Max Blumenthal recently traveled to Lebanon to trash the American media, denounce Israel, and reinforce conspiracy theories about the power of the “Israel lobby” in U.S. politics.

Blumenthal, who is linked to Media Matters for America, told the host of “Transit” on Lebanon’s Future TV that the American media censors criticism of Israel: “There’s no mainstream American television program, cable program, that would allow me to speak as freely as I’m speaking to you right now about some of the issues that I talk about.”

He added, gratefully, that he’s reached a global audience through Al Jazeera, which “everyone watches in the United States.”

Shortly thereafter, Blumenthal slammed Israel: “[D]uring the Second Lebanon War, when Israel was attacking this country, Ehud Olmert, the prime minister at the time, went to Jewish groups in the United States and said: ‘Every Jew in the world is fighting this war.’” (My emphasis.)

Blumenthal did not mention that the war was started by the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah, which targeted Israeli civilians, Jewish and Arab, throughout the war.

There are two reasons for Blumenthal’s bias and cowardice: first, his own far-left agenda; and second, the fact that Hezbollah dominates Lebanese politics and media today. Blumenthal had the “courage” to attack the American media and American democracy on Arab television, but didn’t offer the slightest criticism of Hezbollah or terrorism in general on television in a society where he knew he could suffer real consequences. (Hezbollah members were recently indicted by the UN in the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, who founded Future TV.)

The rest of the interview is filled with lies, demonstrating Blumenthal’s willful ignorance of the peace process and his enthusiasm for tales of “extremely radical” Jewish political donors who he claimed are “sheep for the directors of AIPAC” in U.S. congressional elections.

Blumenthal told viewers in a country whose politics are overshadowed by a tottering Syrian dictatorship, a murderous terrorist mafia and a meddling Iranian theocracy that American democracy is a sham in which the “Israel lobby” writes legislation that the Congress hurries to pass on its behalf. Along the way, he slandered Christians who support Israel and referred to George W. Bush as “the most white president” in American history.

Blumenthal also proudly proclaimed that he will never work as a “staffer” in the American media. Perhaps he could join Cynthia McKinney as a contributor to Iranian state TV?

Actually, that was the position of New York Times columnist Gail Collins in November 2008 concerning President George W. Bush. The economic situation was so bad, she wanted Bush to resign and step aside so that the economic problems could be fixed. But take her article, switch a few words, and her analysis is even more applicable today. Here you go:

“Thanksgiving Labor Day is next week soon, and President Bush Obama could make it a really special holiday by resigning.

Seriously. We have an economy that’s crashing and a vacuum at the top. Bush Obama— who is currently on a trip to Peru to meet with Asian leaders who no longer care what he thinks busy partying and raising campaign cash— hasn’t got the clout, or possibly even the energy, to do anything useful.

His most recent contribution to resolving the fiscal crisis was lecturing representatives of the world’s most important economies on the glories of free-market capitalism the American people about how none of this was his fault.

…

If Bush Obama gives up doing nothing by giving up his job, it’s possible that someday history might elevate him to the ranks of the below average. Better than Franklin Pierce! Smarter than Warren Harding! And healthier than William Henry Harrison!” (more…)

There was an interesting exchange between Jake Tapper and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney earlier this week. Just a short while after Carney proclaimed that the President would “not rest until everyone in America who wants a job has a job,” the White House announced that the President will be taking a nine-day August rest in Cape Cod.  This means that Obama plans to have unemployment fixed within the next two weeks or his “not to rest” promise dropped very quickly even for this President.

Tapper decided to ask Carney about the contradiction.

Jake Tapper from ABC News asked Carney if the vacation was appropriate.

Jake Tapper, ABC News: “You said the President will not rest until the joblessness and the economy are worked out, but the President is obviously going on vacation…. Is there any concern about the impression that the President going to Martha’s Vineyard for 9 or 10 days might leave on the American people? And also, if this is such an important issue for Speaker Boehner, for Harry Reid, for President Obama, why the R&R?”

Jay Carney, WH press secretary:... I don’t think Americans out there would begrudge that notion that the President would spend some time with his family. It is also, as I think anyone who has covered in the past, either in this administration or others, there is no such thing as a presidential vacation. The Presidency travels with you. He will be in constant communication and get regular briefings from his national security team as well as his economic team. And he will of course be fully capable, if necessary, of traveling back if that were required. It is not very far.”

I don’t begrudge the President from taking a vacation either, except the timing does seem to be a bit inappropriate. Also the man who defended the President’s vacation, Jay Carney, bashed President Bush for taking one ten years ago. (more…)

It wasn’t that long ago that George W. Bush was president.  Perhaps you remember him: he’s the president whom the mainstream media (MSM) blamed for making up reasons to go to war in Iraq, for giving tax cuts to the rich, for being too dumb to be president, for making America look bad on the international stage, and for sacrificing the planet at the feet of big, bad oil companies.

For the eight years Bush was in office it was a fact of life that anchors like Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann could barely go a broadcast minute without bashing him. And the whole of the MSM couldn’t keep from telling us how deceptive and criminal the Bush/Cheney White House was.

(Remember how Keith Olbermann used to get so mad at Bush that he’d get that spittle in the corner of his mouth but just keep right on talking anyway?)

Sitting here, I wonder what the MSM would have done if they’d learned that the Bush administration had overseen the sale of 2,500 guns to “straw purchasers” who were expected to illegally transport those weapons into Mexico and get them in the hands of cartel members? Moreover, what would they have done had they learned that of those 2,500 guns, only 1,300 were ever recovered (thus leaving 1,200 in the hands of criminals throughout Mexico and along the U.S. southern border)?

In other words – if “Fast and Furious” had taken place under Bush instead of Obama, would the New York Times have reported it as quickly as they reported our phone-taps to the enemy?

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CHRIS MATTHEWS:  Tonight, Democratic National Committee Chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz.  Welcome, Ma’m.  Let’s play hardball.

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ:  Do me a favor, Chris.  Call me Madame Chair, or Chairwoman, or even Chérie.  Not M’am, which I find demeaning.

MATTHEWS:  Ok, uh, Chérie. First up, a small thing: you used to be Wasserman dash Schultz.  Now you’re just plain Wasserman Schultz.  When did you lose your hyphen?

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ:  I was sixteen, Chris, and Billy Collins and I were making out in his car at Lookout Point.  Well, things got out of hand, and . . . .

MATTHEWS:  Never mind.  You wanna make a coupla outrageous claims about Republicans?

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ:  Sure.  Wal-Mart and the Koch brothers plan to lay off 100,000 employees late next year to spike unemployment reports before the election.

MATTHEWS:  Anything else?

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ:  Rick Perry wants illegals arrested and sentenced to three years hard labor picking cotton for Monsanto.

MATTHEWS:  Muy loco.

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ:  Finally, Speaker Boehner’s proposing that African-Americans provide DNA evidence at the polls to prove they are who they say they are.

MATTHEWS:  Shameless.

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ:  Jesse Jackson told me last week he’s been hearing the voices of long-deceased African-Americans pleading for retroactive enfranchisement.  Oh, if only we still had the House. (more…)

I sometimes wonder if the media thinks the public has a universal case of amnesia. Like we can’t remember what they were saying way, way back in the days when George W. Bush was president.

Bush was president right after Grover Cleveland, I believe.

You remember Bush, don’t you? The media hated the guy. They hated him because he started two wars. He started them because this guy named Saddam Hussein (who became nicer the more they hated Bush) picked a fight with Bush’s Daddy and it was basically that simple (oh, there was some oil mixed in there too, so you can pick either reason). There was also a Good War and a Bad War. Afghanistan was Good, Iraq was Bad.

Today the same people who hung on every word said by anti-war Cindy Sheehan during the Bush presidency can’t find Cindy anymore and there are only Good Wars.” We actually have three wars going on now and they are suddenly all good. One is kinetic, which means it just happened and nobody could help it or stop it. We certainly can’t blame anybody for it. Besides, nobody is really getting killed in this latest war (somewhere in Africa, I believe) because we don’t see them being killed on TV anymore. It’s tough to get video signals for those live shots out of Libya these days, and cameras don’t work well in the deserts of North Africa. There’s sand and all that stuff. You know what happened the first time you took a camera to the beach. (more…)

OK, back only to promote the Wounded Warriors project, but he doesn’t leave without a comedic-because-it’s-true soundbite.

VIDEO

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About three miles south of Beverly Hills in the upper-middle class neighborhood of Beverlywood is Hamilton High School. An otherwise ordinary Los Angeles Unified School District-sponsored juvenile detention center, Hamilton is home to a couple of well regarded magnet programs, particularly the Academy of Music Magnet. The Music Magnet is the old stomping grounds of pop stars, Broadway talent, and even Hollywood A-listers who were drawn to a public school program that has a focus on the arts. Yet, even this rare LAUSD high school that students actually want to attend has become a casualty of the horrendous budget crises in the state of California.

Reporter Steve Lopez was dispatched to the scene to write up the various cutbacks for the Los Angeles Times. Lopez is known for being the journalist whose articles on a schizophrenic musician inspired the Robert Downey Jr./Jaime Foxx film The Soloist. Then all of a sudden, what had the makings of a compelling human interest piece on one of the handful of quintessentially Hollywood high schools quickly devolved into a sob story about how these poor teachers and students have been victimized by the dastardly Republicans and their resistance to tax hikes.

How did he do this?

First, Lopez paints a rosy picture of the school by glowingly describing a performance by the jazz band and cherry-picking quotes raving about teachers; his portrayal of Hamilton is a lot like Sean Penn’s depiction of Iraq in Team America:

As it happens, Hamilton is my local high school and I have family and friends who have graduated from the Music Magnet in recent years. To put it bluntly, many of their experiences didn’t resemble the mythical land of incredible teachers and students anxious to learn that Lopez describes. An anonymous Hamilton graduate told me she recalls students doing cocaine in the state-of the art auditorium (which was overhauled with a lavish grant to the Music Magnet)—in fact, the source recalled students showing up to class on an assortment of drugs. Faculty members were seen “celebrating” with students at cast parties after plays.

And I thought programs like these were meant to keep kids off drugs. (more…)