We are told Fareed Zakaria is an intelligent man, a man of letters and a journalist. With his latest article in TIME, I’m just not seeing it. It is full of contradictions and transparent attacks on conservatives followed by praise for Ye Olde School conservatives, who espoused more or less the same thing as current conservatives.

Zakaria starts by praising the classical conservatives for basing their ideas on reality, as compared to the Marxists as socialists who start from an imagined society. The great conservative thinkers, he goes on, have tried to understand society, accept it and then help it evolve. He’s one hundred percent correct.

This is the point at which he begins to go wrong. His main claim is that conservatives have moved from the concrete to the abstract and he laments this supposed shift. His first attack is on the idea that Americans are over taxed. While it can be argued that America has a relatively low INDIVIDUAL tax rate as compared to other industrialized nations, he doesn’t take into effect two main points. If one includes State taxes, for those states that levy these as well as other taxes, the mean tax rate on Americans is approximately 40%. More importantly the CORPORATE tax rate on American businesses is the second highest amongst OECD nations, also at about 40%. Zakaria goes out his way to point to Germany as a country that has high taxes while avoiding the same financial issues that we see in the US. That is a debatable issue, one that balances on Germany’s role in the European Union and its control of the Euro, but one thing that the article leaves out is that, in 2008, Germany cut its corporate income tax rate by 8.7%, putting it as one of the countries with the LOWEST corporate income tax rates.

The next straw man Zakaria tries to build is in finding another President who has been as hostile to business as Obama. Yes, Nixon was not a conservative when it came to business. Yes, Nixon presided over 70% tax rates and price controls, but nobody can say that Nixon took every opportunity to bash business, increase the regulatory state exponentially or create such a wide swath of uncertainty in the business markets.

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Recently in the New York Times, JFK speechwriter and adviser Ted Sorensen commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy/Nixon debates: “When Kennedy Met Nixon: The Real Story,” reads the op-ed’s title.

Turns out, however, that the “real story” as “revealed” by Sorensen is identical to the one filtered through the MSM for the past fifty years:  Kennedy, we’re given to understand, trounced Nixon—and not just in style—mainly in substance. Sorensen also laments what “now passes for political debate in our increasingly commercialized, sound-biteTwitter-fied culture, in which extremist rhetoric requires presidents to respond to outrageous claims.”

Nothing of the sort, we’re given to understand, marred those heady and substantive debates of yore. Take Kennedy’s claim that President Eisenhower had fallen asleep (or gone golfing) during his command and allowed a perilous “missile gap” to grow between the U.S. and the Soviets. In fact a huge gap had grown (roughly six thousand for us, three hundred for the Soviets.)

Might this qualify as an “outrageous claim” by Kennedy?  Not if your source is Ted Sorensen and the New York Times. In fact, prior to the debates, CIA director Allen Dulles had briefed Kennedy on the genuine missile numbers. But rather than respond to this genuinely outrageous claim, Nixon bit his tongue. Disclosing the real number (that JFK knew perfectly well) in public would alert the Soviets to how we got their number, and jeopardize U.S. national security.  Which is to say, to blindside his Republican opponent Kennedy relied on that opponent’s patriotism. Let’s face it, Republicans are at a woeful disadvantage here. (more…)

Things were going so well for David Shuster at the start of the year. On January 26, James O’Keefe, chief ACORN-buster, and several of his friends had just been arrested for “breaking into” the office of Senator Mary Landrieu. The MSM sharks started circling. Blood was in the water. Cries of “Watergate, Jr.” reverberated throughout the vast MSM echo chamber, led by the king reverberator himself, David Shuster, in this whole overblown non-scandal.

For a refresher course in MSM diversion and moral equivalence, watch Shuster bend over backwards, Cirque-du-Soleil style, to defend ACORN while simultaneously all-but-convicting O’Keefe of felony burglary. Shuster claims in the Breitbart video that “O’Keefe wanted to shame Senator Mary Landrieu.” Yes, Dave. He wanted to. But she’d already beaten him to it.

At the time of the real Watergate scandal, Shuster was just out of kindergarten. Perhaps this explains his first-grade level of skepticism of politicians. It makes one wonder: where did the man get his B.A. from–  the Kumbaya School of Communications? Yesterday, O’Keefe pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor in the Landrieu event. End of non-story. (more…)

To those of us who attended college in the late sixties and early seventies, the killings at Kent State University on May 4, 1970 remain indelibly fixed in memory.  They came at a particularly turbulent time in the country’s history, following the annus horribilis of 1968 and the murders of Martin and Bobby; the student strikes and uprisings, not only in the U.S. but in Europe, particularly France; the Cuban airplane hijackings, the rise of Middle Eastern terrorism and the tumult of the Nixon Administration.

For years, the media narrative has been fixed: that a skittish and undisciplined National Guard fired unprovoked into a crowd of student protesters, killing four.  Now comes Fox News’s James Rosen with a revisionist take:

Previously undisclosed FBI documents suggest that the Kent State antiwar protests were more meticulously planned than originally thought and that one or more gunshots may have been fired at embattled Ohio National Guardsmen before their killings of four students and woundings of at least nine others on that searing day in May 1970.

As the nation marks the 40th anniversary of the Kent State antiwar protests Tuesday, a review of hundreds of previously unpublished investigative reports sheds a new — and very different — light on the tragic episode.

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Over at National Review Online, the brilliant and tenacious Jim Geraghty has long held that every statement by Barack Hussein Obama comes with an expiration date. Every one of them.

Now, he’s assembled his complete collection of no-longer-operative declarations by the President of the United States into one handy cyber clip-’n-save, which you can read here.  A sampling:

STATEMENT: “We’ve got a philosophical difference, which we’ve debated repeatedly, and that is that Senator Clinton believes the only way to achieve universal health care is to force everybody to purchase it. And my belief is, the reason that people don’t have it is not because they don’t want it but because they can’t afford it.” Barack Obama, speaking at a Democratic presidential debate, February 21, 2008.

EXPIRATION DATE: On March 23, 2010, Obama signed the individual mandate into law.

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Claude Brodesser-Akner has a column in New York Magazine’s new culture blog (Vulture) recently in which he sounds a warning, in hushed conspiratorial tones, about an effort underway by Hollywood to use Evangelical/Christian organizations to spread the word of their faith-based films to Christian audiences.

Dear God, say it ain’t so!!!!

Full disclosure, I am not an Evangelical… I haven’t even been inside a church for any reason other than to attend a wedding or funeral in some 20 years… but I’m just not sure what the big scoop is here. Brodesser-Akner seems to have discovered a vast conspiracy to… well let’s take the case of The Passion of the Christ. (more…)

During an interview with MSNBC’s Joy Behar on Feb. 21, MSNBC’s Donny Deutsch let his bigot flag fly.  While fulminating against the tea-party movement in general and in particular against the candidate known as “the tea-party candidate,” who gave the rousing opening speech at CPAC, Deutsch blurted:  “You almost need that blank piece of paper. That’s the new model. Like, you know, this coconut (Marco) Rubio down in Florida.”

In settings like MSNBC (but usually backstage) the term coconut (brown on the outside white on the inside) is generally used to castigate “Hispanics” who ignore marching orders barked by Democratic/MSM drill sergeants—same as “Oreo” for similarly uppity blacks.

Never mind that the Cuban-American Marco Rubio is probably more purely Caucasian than Elvis Presley, Hank Williams, Oral Roberts, Johnny Depp among many other southerners who boast Choctaw/Cherokee heritage. We’ll deal with Deutsch’s stupidity in another article. This one’s about Deutsch’s bigotry, a derivative of his stupidity.

Exit polls show that Cuban-Americans voted against Obama by the highest margins—and by far!—of any U.S. ethnic group, including “anglos.” So we’re fair-game for ethnic slurs—and have been for decades. In fact, Deutsch has as much reason to fulminate against Cuban-Americans as the most virulent nativist.  Regarding the U.S. political mainstream, Cuban-Americans obstinately refuse to assimilate. To wit: (more…)