I imagine that the journalism profession has always attracted more than its fair share of people who are left of center.   So in a way,  the Journolist does not come as any great surprise.  But what does stand out about it is the glaring in-your-face nature of the whole thing.

You see, the old school liberals in journalism,  even though they were left-of-center,  wanted to be journalists first and ideologues second.  There was a code of professionalism, admittedly not always followed,  that called on them to put the pursuit of truth first.  (How one defines the truth is always the question.)  Many of them would not even register to vote, or at least not register to vote with a party affiliation,  because of they wanted to somehow conform to this code.

JournoList stands out because of the hubris of this new batch of liberal journalists.  Forget old school;  they are quite content to pass along emails and concoct plans to label people as “racist” who happen to raise questions about Jeremiah Wright.

The old timers were journalists first,  liberals second.  The new crop is clearly made up of those who are liberals first and journalists second.  Indeed,  their journalism is not an end in itself but a means to achieving their liberal ends.   When the New Left began its Long March Through the Institutions in the sixties,  it began with the universities and other centers of power.  It is culminating in the media world. (more…)

For long-suffering conservatives, Christmas arrived about a month late this year.  But considering all the presents we got this week, it was like coming downstairs and finding the Budweiser Clydesdales under the tree, instead of that crummy used Radio Flyer your dad managed to find on eBay for twenty bucks.

First, on Tuesday, there was the Massachusetts Miracle, in which an obscure state senator named Scott Brown came out of nowhere — okay, Wrentham — to defeat a lackluster and morally dubious Democrat machine party hack who had expected to slow-walk herself, with David Gergen’s blessing, into “Teddy Kennedy’s seat.”  But the Bay State voters had other ideas for the “Massachusette” –

Brown ran hard on the selling point that he would be the 41st vote in the Senate against Harry Reid’s and Nancy Pelosi’s screwball tax-and-wreck “health care” plan, a Rube Goldbergian contraption that would have made Elbridge Gerry weep with envy at all its cut-outs, set-asides, bribes and special-interest stroking.  He also campaigned on the notion that taxpayer dollars would be better spent fighting terrorists instead of paying for lawyers for them.  So, naturally, the first questions he got yesterday from the press corps in Washington were all along the lines of: “You’re not really a Republican, are you?”

To which the Democrats, caught flat-footed as usual, basically reacted like this: (more…)